The Venice Time Machine: 1,000 Years of Venice’s History Gets Digitally Preserved with Artificial Intelligence and Big Data

in Architecture, Archives, Art, History, Technology, TED Talks | March 27th, 2019

Along with hun­dreds of oth­er sea­side cities, island towns, and entire islands, his­toric Venice, the float­ing city, may soon sink beneath the waves if sea lev­els con­tin­ue their rapid rise. The city is slow­ly tilt­ing to the East and has seen his­toric floods inun­date over 70 per­cent of its palaz­zo- and basil­i­ca-lined streets. But should such trag­ic loss­es come to pass, we’ll still have Venice, or a dig­i­tal ver­sion of it, at least—one that aggre­gates 1,000 years of art, archi­tec­ture, and “mun­dane paper­work about shops and busi­ness­es” to cre­ate a vir­tu­al time machine. An “ambi­tious project to dig­i­tize 10 cen­turies of the Venet­ian state’s archives,” the Venice Time Machine uses the lat­est in “deep learn­ing” tech­nol­o­gy for his­tor­i­cal recon­struc­tions that won’t get washed away.

The Venice Time Machine doesn’t only proof against future calami­ty. It also sets machines to a task no liv­ing human has yet to under­take. Most of the huge col­lec­tion at the State Archives “has nev­er been read by mod­ern his­to­ri­ans,” points out the nar­ra­tor of the Nature video at the top.

This endeav­or stands apart from oth­er dig­i­tal human­i­ties projects, Ali­son Abbott writes at Nature, “because of its ambi­tious scale and the new tech­nolo­gies it hopes to use: from state-of-the-art scan­ners that could even read unopened books, to adapt­able algo­rithms that will turn hand­writ­ten doc­u­ments into dig­i­tal, search­able text.”

In addi­tion to pos­ter­i­ty, the ben­e­fi­cia­ries of this effort include his­to­ri­ans, econ­o­mists, and epi­demi­ol­o­gists, “eager to access the writ­ten records left by tens of thou­sands of ordi­nary cit­i­zens.” Lor­raine Das­ton, direc­tor of the Max Planck Insti­tute for the His­to­ry of Sci­ence in Berlin describes the antic­i­pa­tion schol­ars feel in par­tic­u­lar­ly vivid terms: “We are in a state of elec­tri­fied excite­ment about the pos­si­bil­i­ties,” she says, “I am prac­ti­cal­ly sali­vat­ing.” Project head Frédéric Kaplan, a Pro­fes­sor of Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties at the École poly­tech­nique fédérale de Lau­sanne (EPFL), com­pares the archival col­lec­tion to “’dark mat­ter’—doc­u­ments that hard­ly any­one has stud­ied before.”

Using big data and AI to recon­struct the his­to­ry of Venice in vir­tu­al form will not only make the study of that his­to­ry a far less her­met­ic affair; it might also “reshape schol­ars’ under­stand­ing of the past,” Abbott points out, by democ­ra­tiz­ing nar­ra­tives and enabling “his­to­ri­ans to recon­struct the lives of hun­dreds of thou­sands of ordi­nary people—artisans and shop­keep­ers, envoys and traders.” The Time Machine’s site touts this devel­op­ment as a “social net­work of the mid­dle ages,” able to “bring back the past as a com­mon resource for the future.” The com­par­i­son might be unfor­tu­nate in some respects. Social net­works, like cable net­works, and like most his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives, have become dom­i­nat­ed by famous names.

By con­trast, the Time Machine model—which could soon lead to AI-cre­at­ed vir­tu­al Ams­ter­dam and Paris time machines—promises a more street-lev­el view, and one, more­over, that can engage the pub­lic in ways sealed and clois­tered arti­facts can­not. “We his­to­ri­ans were bap­tized with the dust of archives,” says Das­ton. “The future may be dif­fer­ent.” The future of Venice, in real life, might be uncer­tain. But thanks to the Venice Time Machine, its past is poised take on thriv­ing new life. See pre­views of the Time Machine in the videos fur­ther up, learn more about the project here, and see Kaplan explain the “infor­ma­tion time machine” in his TED talk above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Venice Works: 124 Islands, 183 Canals & 438 Bridges

Venice in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images 125 Years Ago: The Rial­to Bridge, St. Mark’s Basil­i­ca, Doge’s Palace & More

New Dig­i­tal Archive Puts Online 4,000 His­toric Images of Rome: The Eter­nal City from the 16th to 20th Cen­turies

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Salvador Dalí & the Marx Brothers’ 1930s Film Script Gets Released as a Graphic Novel

in Film, History | March 27th, 2019

His­to­ry remem­bers Sal­vador Dalí as one of the most indi­vid­u­al­is­tic artists ever to live, but he also had a knack for col­lab­o­ra­tion: with Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitch­cock, Walt Dis­ney, even, in a sense, with Lewis Car­roll and William Shake­speare. But would you believe the list also includes one of the Marx Broth­ers? Though the film on which they col­lab­o­rat­ed in the 1930s nev­er entered pro­duc­tion, its sto­ry has been told by Giraffes on Horse­back Sal­ad, a hybrid of illus­trat­ed text and graph­ic nov­el pub­lished just this month, itself a col­lab­o­ra­tion between pop-cul­ture schol­ar Josh Frank, artist Manuela Perte­ga, and come­di­an Tim Hei­deck­er.

When Dalí went to Hol­ly­wood, he wrote the fol­low­ing to fel­low Sur­re­al­ist André Bre­ton: “I’ve made con­tact with the three Amer­i­can sur­re­al­ists: Har­po Marx, Dis­ney and Cecil B. DeMille.” He seems to have been espe­cial­ly tak­en with Marx.

“They paint­ed each oth­er, and Dalí sent his new friend a full-size harp strung with barbed wire,” writes NPR’s Etel­ka Lehoczky. “So over­come was Dalí with Har­po’s genius that he wrote a treat­ment, and lat­er an abbre­vi­at­ed screen­play, for a Marx Broth­ers movie to be called Giraffes on Horse­back Sal­ad.” (It also had at least one alter­nate title, The Sur­re­al­ist Woman.)

The project made it as far as a meet­ing with MGM head Louis B. May­er, to whom Frank describes Dalí and Marx as pitch­ing such scenes as “Har­po opens an umbrel­la and a chick­en explodes on all the onlook­ers. He … puts each piece [of chick­en] care­ful­ly on a sad­dle that he uses as a plate, a sad­dle not for a horse, but for a giraffe!” Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the busi­ness-mind­ed May­er did­n’t go for it, but Giraffes on Horse­back Sal­ad has had a long after­life as one of the most intrigu­ing films nev­er made. In the ear­ly 1990s, the New York the­ater col­lec­tive Ele­va­tor Repair Ser­vice put on a pro­duc­tion based on the sparse mate­ri­als then known, just a few years before the entire screen­play turned up among Dalí’s per­son­al papers.

“Har­po will be Jim­my, a young Span­ish aris­to­crat who lives in the U.S. as a con­se­quence of polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances in his coun­try,” Dalí wrote. Jim­my was to encounter a “beau­ti­ful sur­re­al­ist woman, whose face is nev­er seen by the audi­ence” in a sto­ry dra­ma­tiz­ing “the con­tin­u­ous strug­gle between the imag­i­na­tive life as depict­ed in the old myths and the prac­ti­cal and ratio­nal life of con­tem­po­rary soci­ety.” Dalí prob­a­bly used the term “sto­ry” loose­ly: “Even jazzed up with jokes by Tim Hei­deck­er (a mod­ern Marx Broth­er if there ever was one), Giraffes on Horse­back Sal­ad — the movie, not the book — is a baf­fling mess,” writes Lehoczky. “Nei­ther Dalí nor Har­po seems to have real­ized that their approach­es to humor were vast­ly dif­fer­ent.”

The Marx Broth­ers, as every one of their fans knows, were “acute­ly con­scious of, and respon­sive to, estab­lished struc­tures: They sub­vert­ed the social order using its own rules.” Dalí, in film and every oth­er medi­um in which he tried his hand (and mus­tache) besides, usu­al­ly head­ed off “in a direc­tion orthog­o­nal to accept­ed real­i­ty.” To what extent Dalí and Marx were aware of that clash — and to what extent they delib­er­ate­ly empha­sized it — dur­ing their work on Giraffes on Horse­back Sal­ad remains a mys­tery, but you can read more about that work, and the work Frank, Perte­ga, and Hei­deck­er put in to bring it to graph­ic fruition more than eighty years lat­er, at NPR, Indiewire, and Hyper­al­ler­gic. The more you learn, the more you’ll won­der how even Dalí and Marx could real­ly imag­ine their project pro­duced by a stu­dio in the Gold­en Age of Hol­ly­wood. But as Tate Mod­ern cura­tor Matthew Gale plau­si­bly the­o­rizes, actu­al­ly mak­ing the film may have been beside the point.

Pick up a copy of Giraffes on Horse­back Sal­ad here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Vin­tage Films by Sal­vador Dalí and Luis Buñuel: Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or

Alfred Hitch­cock Recalls Work­ing with Sal­vador Dali on Spell­bound

Sal­vador Dalí & Walt Disney’s Short Ani­mat­ed Film, Des­ti­no, Set to the Music of Pink Floyd

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

The 55 Strangest, Great­est Films Nev­er Made (Cho­sen by John Green)

Grou­cho Marx and T.S. Eliot Become Unex­pect­ed Pen Pals, Exchang­ing Por­traits & Com­pli­ments (1961)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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New Archive Digitizes 80,000 Historic Watercolor Paintings, the Medium Through Which We Documented the World Before Photography

in Archives, Art, History | March 26th, 2019

The water­col­or paint­ing has a rep­u­ta­tion for light­ness. It’s a casu­al endeav­or, done in scenic out­door sur­round­ings on sun­lit days. Water­col­ors are the choice of week­end hob­by­ists or chil­dren unready for messier mate­ri­als. Water­col­ors, in oth­er words, are often treat­ed as unse­ri­ous. But for a cou­ple hun­dred years, they served a very seri­ous pur­pose. In addi­tion to being a portable medi­um with an expan­sive range, water­col­ors’ ease made them the pri­ma­ry means of mak­ing doc­u­men­tary images before pho­tog­ra­phy com­plete­ly took over this func­tion by the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry when portable con­sumer cam­eras became a real­i­ty.

“Before the inven­tion of the cam­era,” explains the Water­colour World, “peo­ple used water­col­ors to doc­u­ment the world. Over the cen­turies, painters—both pro­fes­sion­al and amateur—created hun­dreds of thou­sands of images record­ing life as they wit­nessed it. Every one of these paint­ings has a sto­ry to tell.”

The Water­colour World is a large-scale dig­i­ti­za­tion of thou­sands of water­col­ors found hid­den away in draw­ers all over the UK by for­mer diplo­mat Fred Hohler, who came up with the idea for the project while on a tour of Britain’s pub­lic col­lec­tions.

“The value—and excitement—of the Water­colour World project,” writes Dale Bern­ing Sawa at The Guardian, “is that it views these his­toric paint­ings as doc­u­ments, not aes­thet­ic objects.” That’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly how their cre­ators’ saw them. “A lot of the val­ue in these images is… acci­den­tal. Often it’s the context—replete with tree­lines, snow­lines or waterlines—the artist paint­ed around, for exam­ple, the flower they’d set out to record.” Such acci­den­tal doc­u­men­ta­tion cap­tured one of the first known images of Mount Ever­est, sit­u­at­ed in the back­ground, in a paint­ing from the 1840s. Of course much of the doc­u­men­tary pur­pose was intentional—in land sur­veys and sci­en­tif­ic illus­tra­tions, and in the many paint­ings, like that above from 1833, of Mount Vesu­vius erupt­ing.

These images are becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant to sci­en­tists and his­to­ri­ans as ice-caps melt, his­tor­i­cal sites are bombed or van­dal­ized, and flo­ra and fau­na dis­ap­pear. With a focus on pre-1900 images, the site launched with around 80,000 dig­i­tized water­col­ors, a num­ber that could expand into over a mil­lion, Hohler esti­mates, at which point, it will become an “absolute­ly indis­pens­able tool to help us under­stand today.” As for under­stand­ing the con­text in which these works were created—it’s com­pli­cat­ed. Many of the paint­ings come with a wealth of iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion. Some of the artists were pro­fes­sion­als, some mil­i­tary drafts­men, botanists, expe­di­tion water­col­orists, and sur­vey­ors.

Some had long, dis­tin­guished careers tak­ing over oth­er coun­tries, like colo­nial British Gen­er­al James Mau­rice Prim­rose, who paint­ed sev­er­al very impres­sive land­scapes in India like 1860’s “In the Neil­gher­ries,” above. And there are also “untold num­bers of ama­teurs,” Sawa writes, “which Hohler sus­pects will turn out to have been most­ly women, unpaid for their time and skill—who picked up a paint­brush to record the world around them.” Who­ev­er these painters were, and what­ev­er moti­vat­ed them to make these works of art, we can be grate­ful that they did, and that these thou­sands of paint­ings, many of which are quite frag­ile, sur­vived long enough for dig­i­ti­za­tion in this impres­sive pub­lic project.

“By mak­ing his­to­ry more vis­i­ble to more peo­ple,” the Water­colour World puts it, “we can deep­en our under­stand­ing of the world.” The UK-based orga­ni­za­tion seeks paint­ings from around the globe; “there are thou­sands of water­colours still to add.” If you have some pre-1900 works to con­tribute, you are encour­aged to get in touch and find out if they’re suit­able for inclu­sion. Enter the Water­colour World here.

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

The Get­ty Dig­i­tal Archive Expands to 135,000 Free Images: Down­load High Res­o­lu­tion Scans of Paint­ings, Sculp­tures, Pho­tographs & Much Much More

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Why Nobody Smiles in Old Photos: The Technological & Cultural Reasons Behind All those Black-and-White Frowns

in History, Photography | March 26th, 2019

We’ve all heard sto­ries of kids who ask their par­ents if the world was real­ly black-and-white in the 1950s, or maybe even been those kids our­selves. With that mat­ter cleared up, chil­dren who’ve seen even old­er col­or­less pho­tographs — say, from around the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry — may fol­low up with anoth­er ques­tion: had­n’t they invent­ed smil­ing back then? If they ask you (or if you’ve won­dered about it your­self), you can take care of it in just three min­utes by pulling up this Vox explain­er on why peo­ple nev­er smiled in old pho­tos. Why, in the words of Phil Edwards writ­ing on the video’s accom­pa­ny­ing page, “did peo­ple in old pho­tos look like they’d just heard the worst news of their life?”

“We can’t know for sure, but a few the­o­ries help us guess what was behind all that black-and-white frown­ing.” The first, and the one you may already know, has to do with the cam­era tech­nol­o­gy of the day, whose “long expo­sure times — the time a cam­era needs to take a pic­ture — made it impor­tant for the sub­ject of a pic­ture to stay as still as pos­si­ble. That way, the pic­ture would­n’t look blur­ry.” But by the year 1900 that prob­lem was more or less solved “with the intro­duc­tion of the Brown­ie and oth­er cam­eras,” which were “still slow by today’s stan­dards, but not so slow that it was impos­si­ble to smile.”

Oth­er the­o­ries explain­ing the smile-free pho­tographs of old include the lin­ger­ing influ­ence of the paint­ed por­trait on the pho­to­graph­ic por­trait; the dom­i­nant idea of pho­tog­ra­phy as a “pas­sage to immor­tal­i­ty” that “meant the medi­um was pre­dis­posed to seri­ous­ness over the ephemer­al”; and that Vic­to­ri­an and Edwar­dian cul­ture itself took a dim view of smil­ing, sup­port­ed by a sur­vey of smil­ing in por­traits con­duct­ed by Nicholas Jeeves at the Pub­lic Domain Review that “came to the con­clu­sion that there was a cen­turies-long his­to­ry of view­ing smil­ing as some­thing only buf­foons did.” Yet late 19th-cen­tu­ry and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry pho­tog­ra­phy isn’t a com­plete­ly smile-free zone, as the Flickr group The Smil­ing Vic­to­ri­an proves.

Edwards includes a pic­ture, tak­en cir­ca 1904, of a man smil­ing not just unmis­tak­ably but huge­ly. He does so as he pre­pares to dig into a bowl of rice, that being an impor­tant part of the cui­sine of Chi­na, where Asian-lan­guage schol­ar Berthold Laufer took an expe­di­tion to cap­ture the every­day life of the Chi­nese peo­ple on film. “His rice-lov­ing sub­ject may have been will­ing to grin because he was from a dif­fer­ent cul­ture with its own sen­si­bil­i­ty con­cern­ing pho­tog­ra­phy and pub­lic behav­ior,” Edwards writes. What­ev­er the rea­sons for the smile on that Chi­nese face or the lack of one on all those Vic­to­ri­ans and Edwar­dians, we must pre­pare our­selves to answer an even more dif­fi­cult ques­tion from pos­ter­i­ty: one about why, exact­ly, we’re doing what we’re doing in the bil­lions of pho­tos we now take of our­selves every day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

See the First Pho­to­graph of a Human Being: A Pho­to Tak­en by Louis Daguerre (1838)

See The First “Self­ie” In His­to­ry Tak­en by Robert Cor­nelius, a Philadel­phia Chemist, in 1839

The First Known Pho­to­graph of Peo­ple Shar­ing a Beer (1843)

The His­to­ry of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes: From Cam­era Obscu­ra to Cam­era Phone

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Archive of Animations/Cartoons of Ancient Greece & Rome: From the 1920s Through Today

in Animation, Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, History, Literature | March 22nd, 2019

Ancient Greece and Rome have pro­vid­ed fer­tile hunt­ing grounds for ani­mat­ed sub­ject mat­ter since the very incep­tion of the form.

So what if the results wind up doing lit­tle more than frol­ic in the pas­toral set­ting? Wit­ness 1930’s Play­ful Pan, above, which can basi­cal­ly be summed up as Sil­ly Sym­pho­ny in a toga (with a cute bear cub who looks a lot like Mick­ey Mouse and some flame play that pre­fig­ures The Sorcerer’s Appren­tice…)

Oth­ers are packed with his­to­ry, myth­ic nar­ra­tive, and peri­od details, though be fore­warned that not all are as visu­al­ly appeal­ing as Steve Simons’ Hoplites! Greeks at War, part of the Panoply Vase Ani­ma­tion Project.

Some series, such as the Aster­ix movies and Aesop and Son—a sta­ple of The Rocky and Bull­win­kle Show from 1959 to 1962—have been the gate­ways through which many his­to­ry lovers’ curios­i­ty was first roused.

(Russ­ian ani­ma­tor Ana­toly Petrov’s erot­ic shorts for Soyuz­mult­film may rouse oth­er, er, curiosi­ties, and are def­i­nite­ly NSFW.)

And then there are instant clas­sics like 2004’s It’s All Greek to Scoo­by in which “Shag­gy’s pur­chase of a mys­te­ri­ous amulet only serves to cause a pes­ter­ing archae­ol­o­gist and cen­taur to chase him.”  (Ye gods…)

Senior Lec­tur­er of Clas­si­cal and Mediter­ranean Stud­ies at Van­der­bilt, Chiara Sul­prizio, has col­lect­ed all of these and more on her blog, Ani­mat­ed Antiq­ui­ty.

Begin­ning with the 2‑minute frag­ment that’s all we have left of Win­sor McCay’s 1921 The Cen­taurs, Sul­prizio shares some of her favorite car­toon rep­re­sen­ta­tions of ancient Greece, Rome, and beyond. Her areas of pro­fes­sion­al spe­cial­iza­tion—gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty, Greek com­e­dy, and Roman satire—are well suit­ed to her cho­sen hob­by, and her com­men­tary dou­bles down on his­tor­i­cal con­text to include the his­to­ry of ani­ma­tion.

The appear­ance of car­toon stars like Daffy Duck, Tom and Jer­ry, and Pop­eye fur­ther demon­strates this antique sub­ject matter’s stur­di­ness. TED-Ed and the BBC may view the genre as an excel­lent teach­ing tool, but there’s noth­ing stop­ping the ani­ma­tor from shoe­horn­ing some fab­ri­ca­tions in amongst the bux­om nymphs and buff glad­i­a­tors.

(Raise your hand if your moth­er ever sac­ri­ficed you on the altar to Spinachia, god­dess of spinach, in hopes that she might unleash a mush­room cloud of super-atom­ic pow­er in your puny bicep.)

You’ll find a num­ber of entries fea­tur­ing the work of Japan­ese and Russ­ian ani­ma­tors, includ­ing Ther­mae Romae, part of the jug­ger­naut that’s sprung from Mari Yamazaki’s pop­u­lar graph­ic nov­el series and Icarus and the Wise Men from the leg­endary Fyo­dor Khitruk, whose retelling of the myth sent a mes­sage about free­dom from the Sovi­et Union, cir­ca 1976.

Begin your decade-by-decade explo­rations of Chiara Sulprizio’s ani­mat­ed antiq­ui­ties here or sug­gest that a miss­ing favorite be added to the col­lec­tion. (We vote for this one!)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vas­es Come to Life with 21st Cen­tu­ry Ani­ma­tion

18 Clas­sic Myths Explained with Ani­ma­tion: Pandora’s Box, Sisy­phus & More

An Ani­mat­ed Recon­struc­tion of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Vir­tu­al­ly-Recre­at­ed Streets

25 Ani­ma­tions of Great Lit­er­ary Works: From Pla­to, Dos­to­evsky & Dick­in­son, to Kaf­ka, Hem­ing­way & Brad­bury

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, this April. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The CIA’s Rectal Tool Kit for Spies–Created for Truly Desperate Situations During The Cold War

in History, Technology | March 15th, 2019

Though glob­al espi­onage remains a going con­cern in the 21st cen­tu­ry, some­how the pop­u­lar sto­ries we tell about it return again and again to the Cold War. Maybe it has to do with the demand those most­ly pre-dig­i­tal decades made upon the phys­i­cal inge­nu­ity of spies as well as the tools of spy­craft. Take, for instance, one par­tic­u­lar­ly inge­nious CIA-issued tool kit on dis­play at the Inter­na­tion­al Spy Muse­um in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. “Filled with escape tools,” says the Spy Muse­um’s web site, “this kit could be stashed inside the body where it would not be found dur­ing a search.” Take one guess as to where inside the body, exact­ly, it could be stashed.

You can get a clos­er look at the rec­tal tool kit in the Atlas Obscu­ra video above. This “tight­ly sealed, pill-shaped con­tain­er full of tools that could aid an escape from var­i­ous sticky sit­u­a­tions,” as that site’s Lizzie Philip describes it, “was issued to CIA oper­a­tives dur­ing the height of the Cold War.”

Built to con­tain a vari­ety of escape tools like “drill bits, saws and knives,” it pre­sent­ed quite an engi­neer­ing chal­lenge: its mate­ri­als, one needs hard­ly add, “could not splin­ter or cre­ate sharp edges that could injure users,” and “it had to seal tight­ly to not let any­thing seep in or poke out.” Upon see­ing an item like this, which com­mands so much atten­tion at the Spy Muse­um, one won­ders whether all the spy­ing that went on dur­ing Cold War was real­ly so glam­orous after all.

Has it crossed the mind of, say, John Le Car­ré, his writ­ing career a near­ly six­ty-year-long defla­tion of the pre­ten­sions of spy­craft, to write about the ins and outs of rec­tal tool kits? But then, per­son­al expe­ri­ence has grant­ed him much more knowl­edge about the tac­tics of British espi­onage than those of the Amer­i­can vari­ety. As sure­ly as he knows the MI5’s offi­cial mot­to, “Reg­num Defende,” he must also know the unof­fi­cial mot­to that pokes fun at the orga­ni­za­tion’s aggres­sive cul­ture of blame avoid­ance, “Rec­tum Defende” — words that, in light of the knowl­edge about just where the agents of Britain’s main ally were stor­ing their tools, take on a whole new mean­ing.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The CIA’s For­mer Chief of Dis­guise Show How Spies Use Cos­tumes in Under­cov­er Oper­a­tions

How the CIA Helped Shape the Cre­ative Writ­ing Scene in Amer­i­ca

Read the CIA’s Sim­ple Sab­o­tage Field Man­u­al: A Time­less, Kafkaesque Guide to Sub­vert­ing Any Orga­ni­za­tion with “Pur­pose­ful Stu­pid­i­ty” (1944)

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

The C.I.A.’s “Bes­tiary of Intel­li­gence Writ­ing” Sat­i­rizes Spook Jar­gon with Mau­rice Sendak-Style Draw­ings

19-Year-Old Stu­dent Uses Ear­ly Spy Cam­era to Take Can­did Street Pho­tos (Cir­ca 1895)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Take a Free Online Course on the Great Medieval Manuscript, the Book of Kells

in Art, History, Online Courses | March 12th, 2019

Last week, we called your atten­tion to the dig­i­ti­za­tion of the Book of Kells, one of the great man­u­scripts from the medieval peri­od. The dig­i­tized man­u­script, we should note, comes accom­pa­nied by anoth­er great resource–a free online course on the Book of Kells. Both dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives are made pos­si­ble by Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin.

The six-week course cov­ers the fol­low­ing top­ics:

  • Where and how the man­u­script was made
  • The social con­text from which the man­u­script emerged, includ­ing ear­ly medieval faith and pol­i­tics
  • The artis­tic con­text of the man­u­script, reflect­ing local and inter­na­tion­al styles
  • The the­ol­o­gy and inter­pre­ta­tions of the text
  • How and why the man­u­script sur­vived
  • The Book of Kells and con­tem­po­rary cul­ture

The course “is for any­one with an inter­est in Ire­land, medieval stud­ies, his­to­ry, art, reli­gion and/or pop­u­lar cul­ture.” Sign up for the free course today.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

80 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

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The Roman Roads of Spain & Portugal Visualized as a Subway Map: Ancient History Meets Modern Graphic Design

in Design, History | March 12th, 2019

Between the first cen­tu­ry BC and the fourth cen­tu­ry AD, Rome dis­played what we might call an impres­sive ambi­tion. In his project illus­trat­ing those chap­ters of his­to­ry in a way no one has before, sta­tis­tics stu­dent Sasha Tru­bet­skoy has shown increas­ing­ly Roman-grade ambi­tions him­self, at least in the realm of his­tor­i­cal graph­ic design. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured his mod­ern sub­way-style maps of the roads of the Roman Empire as well as the Roman roads of Britain here on Open Cul­ture. Today, we have his map of the Roman Roads of Iberia, the region today occu­pied main­ly by Spain and Por­tu­gal.

“This map was a blast to make,” writes Tru­bet­skoy. “I chose to fol­low the Anto­nine Itin­er­ary more strict­ly, which meant that I had to deal with many par­al­lel lines.” Also known as the itin­er­ary of the Emper­or Anton­i­nus or “Itin­er­ar­i­um Provin­cia­rum Antoni(ni) Augusti,” accord­ing to the Roman Roads Research Asso­ci­a­tion, the Anto­nine Itin­er­ary is “a col­lec­tion of 225 lists of stop­ping places along var­i­ous Roman roads across the Roman Empire.” Its val­ue “comes from it being one of a very few doc­u­ments to have sur­vived to mod­ern times which pro­vide detail of names and clues to the loca­tion of Roman sites and the routes of roads.”

Each list, or iter, that makes up the Anto­nine Itin­er­ary “gives the start and end of each route, with the total mileage of that route, fol­lowed by a list of inter­me­di­ate points with the dis­tances in between.” In cre­at­ing his Roman Roads of Iberia sub­way map, Tru­bet­skoy made each iter into its own “line,” though for some of them he had to draw from oth­er sources: “A cou­ple of Anto­nine routes were ambigu­ous and not eas­i­ly placed on a map, while a few impor­tant routes were miss­ing for which there is archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence.”

It takes no small amount of work to con­vert this kind of often patchy and scat­tered knowl­edge from ancient his­to­ry into graph­ics as clean­ly and leg­i­bly designed as Tru­bet­skoy’s Roman-road sub­way maps. But the result, apart from offer­ing a nifty jux­ta­po­si­tion of past and present, reminds us of what the roads of the Romain Empire actu­al­ly meant: a degree of con­nect­ed­ness between dis­tant lands nev­er before achieved in human his­to­ry. You can sup­port Tru­bet­skoy’s efforts to show this to us in ever greater detail by mak­ing the US$9 sug­gest­ed dona­tion to down­load a high-res­o­lu­tion ver­sion of the Roman Roads of Iberia map. Rome was­n’t built in a day, much less its empire: the com­plete sub­way-map­ping of Rome’s roads will also require more time and labor — but then, would the builders of the Roman Empire have described their task as a “blast”?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

The Rise & Fall of the Romans: Every Year Shown in a Time­lapse Map Ani­ma­tion (753 BC ‑1479 AD)

A Won­der­ful Archive of His­toric Tran­sit Maps: Expres­sive Art Meets Pre­cise Graph­ic Design

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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