Discover “Journey of the Universe,” a Multimedia Project That Explores Humanity’s Place in the Epic History of the Cosmos

in Astronomy, Books, History | September 5th, 2018

Today we know what no pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion knew: the his­to­ry of the uni­verse and of the unfold­ing of life on Earth. Through the aston­ish­ing achieve­ments of nat­ur­al sci­en­tists world­wide, we now have a detailed account of how galax­ies and stars, plan­ets and liv­ing organ­isms, human beings and human con­scious­ness came to be.

With this knowl­edge, the ques­tion of what role we play in the 14-bil­lion-year his­to­ry of the uni­verse impos­es itself with greater poignan­cy than ever before. In ask­ing our­selves how we will tell the sto­ry of Earth to our chil­dren, we must inevitably con­sid­er the role of human­i­ty in its his­to­ry, and how we con­nect with the intri­cate web of life on Earth.

In Jour­ney of the Uni­verse–a mul­ti­me­dia edu­ca­tion­al project that fea­tures a book, film and free online courses–evolutionary philoso­pher Bri­an Thomas Swimme and his­to­ri­an of reli­gions Mary Eve­lyn Tuck­er pro­vide an ele­gant, sci­ence-based nar­ra­tive to tell this epic sto­ry, lead­ing up to the chal­lenges of our present moment. The authors describe the ori­gins of humans on Earth, how we devel­oped a sym­bol­ic con­scious­ness, and how our abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate using sym­bols make humans a “plan­e­tary pres­ence.”

We are now faced with a new dynamic—one where the sur­vival of the species and entire ecosys­tems depend pri­mar­i­ly on human activ­i­ty, and the choic­es humans make.

Weav­ing togeth­er the find­ings of mod­ern sci­ence togeth­er with endur­ing wis­dom found in the human­is­tic tra­di­tions of the West, Asia, and indige­nous peo­ples, the authors explore cos­mic evo­lu­tion as a pro­found­ly won­drous process based on cre­ativ­i­ty, con­nec­tion, and inter­de­pen­dence, and they envi­sion an unprece­dent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty for the world’s peo­ple to address the daunt­ing eco­log­i­cal and social chal­lenges of our times.

Devel­oped over sev­er­al decades, and inspired by the authors’ long col­lab­o­ra­tion with Thomas Berry, Jour­ney of the Uni­verse boasts an impres­sive ros­ter of sci­ence advi­sors includ­ing Ursu­la Good­e­nough, Craig Kochel, and Ter­ry Dea­con.

Jour­ney of the Uni­verse is a mul­ti­me­dia edu­ca­tion­al project that includes:

1.) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: A Sto­ry for Our Time Spe­cial­iza­tion avail­able on Cours­era, cre­at­ed by Yale.  This is a col­lec­tion of three Mas­sive Online Open Cours­es that take stu­dents through the sci­en­tif­ic and cul­tur­al cos­mol­o­gy found through­out Jour­ney of the Uni­verse, as well as deep into its lin­eage with cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an and cos­mol­o­gist Thomas Berry:

Course 1: Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: The Unfold­ing of Life

Course 2: Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: Weav­ing Knowl­edge and Action

Course 3: The World­view of Thomas Berry: The Flour­ish­ing of the Earth Com­mu­ni­ty

2) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Film, win­ner of the 2012 San Francisco/Northern Cal­i­for­nia Emmy® Award for best doc­u­men­tary. You can watch the trail­er for the film above

3) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Book, pub­lished by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press. Trans­lat­ed into French, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Ger­man, Turk­ish, Chi­nese, Kore­an, Indone­sian.

4) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Con­ver­sa­tion Series, a twen­ty-part edu­ca­tion­al series inte­grates the per­spec­tives of the sci­ences and the human­i­ties into a retelling of our 13.7 bil­lion year sto­ry. In a series of one-on-one inter­views, sci­en­tists, his­to­ri­ans, and envi­ron­men­tal­ists explore the unfold­ing sto­ry of the uni­verse and Earth and the role of the human in respond­ing to our present chal­lenges.

Devin O’Dea lives in San Fran­cis­co where he serves as the man­ag­er of the Jour­ney of the Uni­verse project: a col­lab­o­ra­tive, mul­ti­me­dia con­ver­sa­tion that draws togeth­er sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies with human­is­tic insights con­cern­ing the nature of the uni­verse.  Devin wel­comes all inter­ests and feed­back to Jour­ney mate­ri­als at devin@journeyoftheuniverse.org.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Earliest Notebooks Now Digitized and Made Free Online: Explore His Ingenious Drawings, Diagrams, Mirror Writing & More

in Art, History, Science | August 31st, 2018

Do a search on the word “poly­math” and you will see an image or ref­er­ence to Leonar­do da Vin­ci in near­ly every result. Many his­tor­i­cal figures—not all of them world famous, not all Euro­peans, men, or from the Ital­ian Renaissance—fit the descrip­tion. But few such record­ed indi­vid­u­als were as fever­ish­ly active, rest­less­ly inven­tive, and aston­ish­ing­ly pro­lif­ic as Leonar­do, who left rid­dles enough for schol­ars to solve for many life­times.

Leonar­do him­self, though world-renowned for his tal­ents in the fine arts, spent more of his time con­ceiv­ing sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies and engi­neer­ing projects. “When he wrote in the ear­ly 1480s to Ludovi­co Sforza, then ruler of Milan, to offer him his ser­vices,” remarks Cather­ine Yvard, Spe­cial Col­lec­tions cura­tor at the Vic­to­ria and Albert Nation­al Art Library, “he adver­tised him­self as a mil­i­tary engi­neer, only briefly men­tion­ing his artis­tic skills at the end of the list.”

But since so few of his projects were, or could be, real­ized in his life­time, we can only expe­ri­ence them through his most­ly inac­ces­si­ble, and gen­er­al­ly inde­ci­pher­able, note­books, which he began keep­ing after the Duke accept­ed his appli­ca­tion. “None of Leonardo’s pre­de­ces­sors, con­tem­po­raries or suc­ces­sors used paper quite like he did,” notes the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um site, “a sin­gle sheet con­tains an unpre­dictable pat­tern of ideas and inventions—the work­ings of both a design­er and a sci­en­tist.”

Part of the dif­fi­cul­ty of piec­ing his lega­cy togeth­er stems from the fact that his hun­dreds of pages of notes have been dis­trib­uted across sev­er­al insti­tu­tions and pri­vate col­lec­tions, not all of them acces­si­ble to researchers. But ambi­tious dig­i­ti­za­tion projects are eras­ing those bar­ri­ers. We recent­ly fea­tured one, a joint effort of the British Library and Microsoft that brought 570 pages from the Codex Arun­del col­lec­tion to the web. As The Art News­pa­per reports, the Vic­to­ria and Albert has now launched a sim­i­lar endeav­or, dig­i­tiz­ing the Codex Forster note­books, so named because they came from the pri­vate col­lec­tion of John Forster in 1876.

This col­lec­tion includes some of Leonardo’s ear­li­est note­books. Codex Forster I, now online, con­tains the ear­li­est note­book the V&A holds, dat­ing from about 1487, and the lat­est, from 1505. “Writ­ten in Leonardo’s famous ‘mir­ror-writ­ing,’” the V&A notes, “the sub­jects explored with­in range from hydraulic engi­neer­ing to a trea­tise on mea­sur­ing solids.” Forster II and III should come online soon. “We are plan­ning to make these two oth­er vol­umes also ful­ly acces­si­ble online in 2019 to cel­e­brate the 500th anniver­sary of Leonardo’s death,” says Yvard.

The most inno­v­a­tive aspect of this par­tic­u­lar project is the use of IIIF (Inter­na­tion­al Image Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty Frame­work), a tech­nol­o­gy that “has enabled us to present the codex in a new way,” remarks Kati Price, V&A’s head of dig­i­tal media. “We’ve used deep-zoom func­tion­al­i­ty… to present some of the most spec­tac­u­lar and detailed items in our col­lec­tion.” Schol­ars and laypeo­ple alike can take a very close-up look at the many schemat­ics and tech­ni­cal dia­grams in the note­books and see Leonardo’s mind and hand at work.

But while all of us can mar­vel at the sight of his engi­neer­ing genius, when it comes to read­ing his hand­writ­ing, we’ll have to rely on experts. Let’s hope the muse­um will some­day sup­ply trans­la­tions for non­spe­cial­ists. In the mean­time, explore the dig­i­tized man­u­scripts here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490) Is Much Cool­er Than Yours

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

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John Turturro Introduces America to the World Wide Web in 1999: Watch A Beginner’s Guide To The Internet

in Film, History, Web/Tech | August 30th, 2018

There are only two kinds of sto­ry, holds a quote often attrib­uted to Leo Tol­stoy: a man goes on a jour­ney, or a stranger comes to town. When it set about pro­duc­ing A Begin­ner’s Guide to the Inter­net, a “com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice video” geared to view­ers unfa­mil­iar with the World Wide Web, inter­net por­tal com­pa­ny Lycos went with the lat­ter. That stranger, a his­to­ry teacher and aspir­ing come­di­an named Sam Levin, comes to a town named Tick Neck, Penn­syl­va­nia, his car hav­ing bro­ken down ear­ly in a cross-coun­try dri­ve to a gig in Las Vegas. In order to update his manager/sister on the sit­u­a­tion, he stops into the rur­al ham­let’s only din­er and orders “cof­fee, half reg­u­lar and half decaf — and the tele­phone book.”

Sam does­n’t make a call; instead he unplugs the din­er’s phone, con­nects the line to his com­put­er, looks up his inter­net ser­vice provider’s local num­ber, and (after the req­ui­site modem sounds) gets on the infor­ma­tion super­high­way. Today we know few activ­i­ties as mun­dane as going online at a cof­fee shop, but the towns­peo­ple, inno­cent even of e‑mail, are trans­fixed. Sam shows a cou­ple of kids how to search for infor­ma­tion on haunt­ed hous­es and col­lege schol­ar­ships, and soon the stu­dents become the teach­ers, demon­strat­ing online games to friends, chat rooms to a cranky old-timer (“I don’t like this word net­work at all. Net­work of what? Spies, prob­a­bly”) and even state gov­ern­ment feed­back forms to the may­or of Tick Neck (who describes her­self as “not much with a key­board”).

Though at times it feels like the 1950s, the year was 1999, per­haps the last moment before Amer­i­ca’s com­plete inter­net sat­u­ra­tion — before social media, before stream­ing video, before blogs, before almost every­thing pop­u­lar online today. “The video for Inter­net ‘new­bies’ star­ring John Tur­tur­ro was made avail­able for free rental on the com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice shelf of over 4,000 Block­buster Video stores, West Coast Video stores, pub­lic school libraries and class­rooms across the Unit­ed States,” says a con­tem­po­rary arti­cle at Newenglandfilm.com. “The pro­duc­tion was fund­ed by Lycos who has insti­tut­ed a cam­paign to bet­ter edu­cate the pub­lic about the World Wide Web.”

Those of us on the Web in the 1990s will remem­ber Lycos, which ran one of the pop­u­lar search engines before the age of Google. Launched in 1994 as a research project at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty in Pitts­burgh (which might explain A Begin­ner’s Guide to the Inter­net’s set­ting), Lycos was in 1999 the most vis­it­ed online des­ti­na­tion in the world, and the next year Span­ish telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny Tele­fóni­ca acquired it for a cool $12.5 bil­lion. Tur­tur­ro, not to be out­done, had in 1998 ascend­ed to a high lev­el of the coun­ter­cul­tur­al zeit­geist with his role in the Coen broth­ers’ The Big Lebows­ki, the pur­ple-clad bowler Jesus Quin­tana — very much not a stranger any­one would want going online with their kids, but Tur­tur­ro has always had a for­mi­da­ble range.

His­to­ry has­n’t record­ed how many new­bies A Begin­ner’s Guide to the Inter­net helped to start surf­ing the Web, but the video remains a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­fact of atti­tudes to the inter­net dur­ing its first peri­od of enor­mous growth. “My fam­i­ly does­n’t own a com­put­er,” the young boy tells Sam, “and my dad does­n’t like ’em. He says facts are facts.” (That last sen­tence, innocu­ous at the time, does take on a new res­o­nance today.) The boy’s teenage sis­ter excit­ed­ly describes the inter­net as “like going to the library, depart­ment store, and post office, all at the same time.” Enter­ing his cred­it card num­ber to buy an auto-repair man­u­al for the skep­ti­cal mechan­ic, Sam says (with a strange defen­sive­ness) that “it’s com­plete­ly pri­vate. I’ve done it before and it’s not a prob­lem.” As with any stranger of leg­end who comes to town, Sam leaves Tick Neck a changed place — though not near­ly as much as the Tick Necks of the world have since been changed by the inter­net itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Send an E‑mail: A 1984 British Tele­vi­sion Broad­cast Explains This “Sim­ple” Process

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

In 1999, David Bowie Pre­dicts the Good and Bad of the Inter­net

What’s the Inter­net? That’s So 1994…

John Tur­tur­ro Reads Ita­lo Calvino’s Fairy Tale, “The False Grand­moth­er,” in a Short Ani­mat­ed Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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Conserve the Sound, an Online Museum Preserves the Sounds of Past Technologies–from Typewriters, Electric Shavers and Cassette Recorders, to Cameras & Classic Nintendo

in Archives, History, Libraries, Technology | August 28th, 2018

The unmis­tak­able zip and whirr of a rotary phone, the ungod­ly squeal of dial-up modems, the sat­is­fy­ing thunk of a car­tridge in a clas­sic Nin­ten­do con­sole, a VCR rewind­ing, the click-clack sound of a Walk­man’s but­tons…. I date myself in say­ing that these sounds imme­di­ate­ly send me back to var­i­ous moments in my child­hood with Prous­t­ian immer­sion. The sense of smell is most close­ly linked to mem­o­ry, but hear­ing can­not be far behind giv­en how sound embeds itself in time, and most espe­cial­ly the sounds of tech­nolo­gies, which are by nature fat­ed for obso­les­cence. A muse­um-qual­i­ty aura sur­rounds the Walk­man and the first iPods. These are tri­umphs of con­sumer design, but only one of them makes dis­tinc­tive mechan­i­cal nois­es.

As ana­log recedes, it can seem that noisy tech in gen­er­al becomes more and more dat­ed. It is hard to hear the rub­bing of thumbs and fin­gers across screens and touch­pads. Voice com­mands make but­tons and switch­es redun­dant. How much tech from now will one day fea­ture in Con­serve the Sound, the “online muse­um for van­ish­ing and endan­gered sounds”?

Its col­lec­tion gives the impres­sion of a bygone age, quaint in its dozens of exam­ples of mechan­i­cal inge­nu­ity. The visu­al jux­ta­po­si­tion of hand­held film cam­eras, type­writ­ers, car win­dow han­dles, elec­tric shavers, boom box­es, stop­watch­es, and so on has the effect of mak­ing these things seem all of a piece, assort­ed arti­facts in a great hall of won­ders called “the Sound the 20th Cen­tu­ry.”

At the top of the site’s “Sound” page, time­line nav­i­ga­tion allows users to vis­it every decade from the 1910s to the 2000s, a cat­e­go­ry that con­tains only two objects. Oth­er dis­plays are more plen­ti­ful, and col­or­ful. The 1960s, for exam­ple show­cas­es the incred­i­bly sexy red Schreib­mas­chine Olivet­ti Dora fur­ther up. It sounds as sleek and sophis­ti­cat­ed as it looks. The vir­tu­al dis­play case of the 30s holds the sounds of a twin-engine pro­peller plane and a hand­ful of beau­ti­ful mov­ing and still cam­eras, like the Fotokam­era Pur­ma Spe­cial above. It also fea­tures the hum­ble and endur­ing library stamp, a sound I pine for as I slide books under the self-check­out laser scan­ner at my local branch.

Giv­en just the few images here, you can already see that Con­serve the Sound is as much a feast for the eyes as for the ears, each object lov­ing­ly pho­tographed against an aus­tere white back­ground. In order for the full nos­tal­gic effect to work, how­ev­er, you need to vis­it these pages and hit “play.” It even mag­i­cal­ly works with objects from before our times, giv­en how promi­nent­ly their sounds fea­ture in film and audio record­ings that define the peri­ods. You’ve like­ly also noticed how many of these prod­ucts are of Euro­pean ori­gin, and many of them, like the robot­ic head of the Kas­set­ten­reko­rder Wel­tron Mod­el 2004, are per­haps unfa­mil­iar to many con­sumers from else­where in the world.

Con­serve the Sound is a Euro­pean project, fund­ed by the Film & Medi­en­s­tiftung NRW in Ger­many, thus its selec­tion skews toward Euro­pean-made prod­ucts. But the sound of a fan or an adding machine in Ger­many is the sound of a fan or adding machine in Chile, Chi­na, Kenya, or Nebras­ka. See a trail­er for the project at the top of the post, and below, one of the many inter­views in which Ger­man pub­lic fig­ures, schol­ars, librar­i­ans, tech­ni­cians, and stu­dents answer ques­tions about their mnemon­ic asso­ci­a­tions with tech­no­log­i­cal sound. In this inter­view, radio pre­sen­ter Bian­ca Hau­da describes one of her favorite old sounds from a favorite old machine, a 1970s portable cas­sette recorder.

via WFMU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Bri­an Eno Once Com­posed Music for Win­dows 95; Now He Lets You Cre­ate Music with an iPad App

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

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

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The Assassin’s Cabinet: A Hollowed Out Book, Containing Secret Cabinets Full of Poison Plants, Made in 1682

in Books, History | August 23rd, 2018

Has­n’t every child dreamed of a hav­ing a hol­lowed-out book on their shelf, inside of which they can hide what­ev­er for­bid­den objects of mis­chief they like with­out fear of dis­cov­ery? The idea sure­ly goes back many gen­er­a­tions, and pos­si­bly even to the era when not many adults, let along chil­dren, owned any books at all. A decade ago, a hol­lowed-out book dat­ed 1682 went up on the auc­tion block at Ger­man house Her­mann His­tor­i­ca, and these pho­tos of its elab­o­rate design have cap­ti­vat­ed the imag­i­na­tions of even we 21st-cen­tu­ry behold­ers. But what are all the spaces with­in meant to con­tain?

Her­rman His­tor­i­ca’s list­ing describes the item as “a hol­low book used as secret poi­son cab­i­net,” a con­clu­sion pre­sum­ably arrived at after exam­in­ing its draw­ers’ “hand­writ­ten paper labels with the Latin names of dif­fer­ent poi­so­nous plants (among them cas­tor-oil plant, thorn apple, dead­ly night­shade, valer­ian, etc.).” My Mod­ern Met’s Jes­si­ca Stew­art adds that “call­ing it an assas­s­in’s cab­i­net may be a bit exag­ger­at­ed,” not­ing that “many of these plants, while poi­so­nous, were also part of herbal reme­dies —mak­ing it equal­ly pos­si­ble we are look­ing at an ornate med­i­cine cab­i­net.”

Book Addic­tion breaks down the nature and uses of the plants meant to be stored in the draw­ers, includ­ing Hyoscya­mus Niger, which in medieval times “was often used in com­bi­na­tion with oth­er plants to a make ‘mag­ic brews’ with psy­choac­tive prop­er­ties”; Aconi­tum Napel­lus, which in ancient Roman times “was a such a com­mon poi­son of choice among mur­ders and assas­sins that its cul­ti­va­tion was pro­hib­it­ed”; and Cicu­ta Virosa, which some have spec­u­lat­ed “was the hem­lock used by the ancient Greek Repub­lic as the state poi­son but as it is a native of north­ern Europe this may not be true,” but “is so tox­ic that a sin­gle bite into its root can be fatal” regard­less.

Strong stuff, whether for killing or cur­ing. The ambi­gu­i­ty between those two pur­pos­es has sure­ly stoked our mod­ern inter­est in this secret­ly repur­posed book, as has its nature as what Her­rman His­tor­i­ca calls an “elab­o­rate­ly worked Kun­stkam­mer object” — a “cab­i­net of curiosi­ties” of the kind that has long fas­ci­nat­ed mankind — “with strong ref­er­ence to the memen­to mori theme.” That ref­er­ence comes chiefly in the form of not just the proud-look­ing skele­ton on the inside cov­er, but the label on the bot­tle pro­vid­ed its own com­part­ment in the book: “Statu­tum est hominibus semel mori,” or “It is a fact that man must die one day.” But did the own­er of this book and the tools hid­den with­in want to has­ten that day, or delay it?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

Old Books Bound in Human Skin Found in Har­vard Libraries (and Else­where in Boston)

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study (1588)

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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The History of Cartography, “the Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever Undertaken,” Is Free Online

in History, Maps | August 22nd, 2018

“Car­tog­ra­phy was not born full-fledged as a sci­ence or even an art,” wrote map his­to­ri­an Lloyd Brown in 1949. “It evolved slow­ly and painful­ly from obscure ori­gins.” Many ancient maps made no attempt to repro­duce actu­al geog­ra­phy but served as abstract visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions of polit­i­cal or the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. Writ­ten geog­ra­phy has an ancient pedi­gree, usu­al­ly traced back to the Greeks and Phoeni­cians and the Roman his­to­ri­an Stra­bo. But the mak­ing of visu­al approx­i­ma­tions of the world seemed of lit­tle inter­est until lat­er in world his­to­ry. As “medi­a­tors between an inner men­tal world and an out­er phys­i­cal world”—in the words of his­to­ri­an J.B. Harley—the maps of the ancients tend­ed to favor the for­mer. This is, at least, a very gen­er­al out­line of the ear­ly his­to­ry of maps.

Harley’s def­i­n­i­tion occurs in the first chap­ter of Vol­ume One of The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, a mas­sive six-vol­ume, mul­ti-author work trac­ing map mak­ing from pre­his­toric times up to the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry; “the most ambi­tious overview of map mak­ing ever under­tak­en,” Edward Roth­stein writes at The New York Times.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go project, begun in the mid-80s, com­bines “essays based on orig­i­nal research by author­i­ta­tive schol­ars with exten­sive illus­tra­tions of rare and unusu­al maps.” Unlike his­to­ries like Brown’s, how­ev­er, this one aims to move beyond “a deeply entrenched Euro­cen­tric­i­ty.” The project includes non-West­ern and pre-medieval maps, pre­sent­ing itself as “the first seri­ous glob­al attempt” to describe the car­tog­ra­phy of African, Amer­i­can, Arc­tic, Asian, Aus­tralian, and Pacif­ic soci­eties as well as Euro­pean. In so doing, it illu­mi­nates many of those “obscure ori­gins.”

You might expect such an ambi­tious offer­ing to come with an equal­ly ambi­tious pric­etag, and you’d be right. But rather than pay over $200 dol­lars for each indi­vid­ual book in the series, you can read and down­load Vol­umes One through Three and Vol­ume Six as free PDFs at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press’s site. In these extra­or­di­nary schol­ar­ly works, you’ll find maps repro­duced nowhere else—like the Star Fres­co from Jor­dan just above—with deeply learned com­men­tary explain­ing how they cor­re­spond to very dif­fer­ent ways of see­ing the world.

At the links below, see images of maps from all over the globe and through­out record­ed human his­to­ry, and begin to see the his­to­ry of car­tog­ra­phy in very dif­fer­ent ways your­self.

Vol­ume 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions

Vol­ume 2: Part 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–24)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 25–40)

Vol­ume 2: Part 2

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–16)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 17–40)

Vol­ume 2: Part 3

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–8)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 9 –24)

Vol­ume 3: Part 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–24)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 25–40)

Vol­ume 3: Part 2

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 41–56)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 57–80)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

A Map Show­ing How the Ancient Romans Envi­sioned the World in 40 AD

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

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The Hobo Code: An Introduction to the Hieroglyphic Language of Early 1900s Train-Hoppers

in History | August 22nd, 2018

Many of us now use the word hobo to refer to any home­less indi­vid­ual, but back in the Amer­i­ca of the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, to be a hobo meant some­thing more. It meant, specif­i­cal­ly, to count your­self as part of a robust cul­ture of itin­er­ant labor­ers who criss-crossed the coun­try by hitch­ing ille­gal rides on freight trains. Liv­ing such a lifestyle on the mar­gins of soci­ety demand­ed the mas­tery of cer­tain tech­niques as well as a body of secret knowl­edge, an aspect of the hey­day of hobodom sym­bol­ized in the “hobo code,” a spe­cial hiero­glyph­ic lan­guage explained in the Vox video above.

“Wan­der­ing from place to place and per­form­ing odd jobs in exchange for food and mon­ey, hobos were met with both open arms and firearms,” writes Antique Archae­ol­o­gy’s Sarah Buck­holtz. “From ille­gal­ly jump­ing trains to steal­ing scraps from a farm­ers mar­ket, the hobo com­mu­ni­ty need­ed to cre­ate a secret lan­guage to warn and wel­come fel­low hobos that were either new to town or just pass­ing through.”

The code, writ­ten on brick walls, bases of water tow­ers, or any oth­er sur­face that did­n’t move, “assigned cir­cles and arrows for gen­er­al direc­tions like, where to find a meal or the best place to camp. Hash­tags sig­naled dan­ger ahead, like bad water or an inhos­pitable town.”

Hash­tags sounds a bit Mil­len­ni­al for hobo cul­ture, but on some lev­el the term does make sense. Some of the abstract­ed sym­bols of the hobo code look a bit more like emo­ji: a loco­mo­tive mean­ing “good place to catch a train,” a build­ing with a barred door mean­ing “this is a well-guard­ed house,” a cat mean­ing “a kind lady lives here.” But how much use did the hobo code actu­al­ly see? “The prob­lem is, all this infor­ma­tion came from hobos, a group that took pride in their elu­sive­ness and embell­ished sto­ry­telling,” says the Vox video’s nar­ra­tor. “The truth is, there real­ly isn’t any evi­dence that these signs were as wide­ly used as the lit­er­a­ture sug­gests.”

“Hobos used their mythol­o­gy as a kind of cov­er,” says hobo his­to­ri­an Bill Daniel. “The tall tales, the draw­ings, even the books” — espe­cial­ly vol­umes penned by “A‑No.1,” the most famous hobo of them all — “were ways to project an image of them­selves that both blew them up, but also kept them hid­den.” Yet hobo ways, which encom­passed even an eth­i­cal code that we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, have their descen­dants. Take, for instance, the hobo prac­tice of writ­ing their nick­names, or “monikers,” on trains and else­where to show the world where they’d been and where they were head­ed. The line to mod­ern urban graf­fi­ti almost draws itself, espe­cial­ly in the prac­tice of sub­way-car “bomb­ing” in 1970s and 80s New York. The hobo has gone, but the char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly hardy hobo spir­it finds a way to live on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Hobo Eth­i­cal Code of 1889: 15 Rules for Liv­ing a Self-Reliant, Hon­est & Com­pas­sion­ate Life

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs

Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe

‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Hobo Blues’: Great Per­for­mances by John Lee Hook­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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Free: Download 70,000+ High-Resolution Images of Chinese Art from Taipei’s National Palace Museum

in Art, History, Museums | August 21st, 2018

Dur­ing Chi­na’s Ming and Qing dynas­ties, which togeth­er spanned the years 1386 to 1912, few in the Mid­dle King­dom, let alone else­where, could hope for even a glimpse of the finest Chi­nese art­works of their time. But recent­ly one muse­um has made a trove of art and arti­facts from those dynas­ties and oth­ers dig­i­tal­ly acces­si­ble to the world, and a muse­um out­side main­land Chi­na at that. “Accord­ing to pop­u­lar news web­site The Paper,” writes the BBC’s Ker­ry Allen, “Taipei’s Nation­al Palace Muse­um has placed 70,000 high-qual­i­ty elec­tron­ic images in a free-to-down­load archive so that online users can enjoy its exhi­bi­tions” — and with­out the has­sles of “glass bar­ri­er and light­ing restric­tions.”

First estab­lished as the Palace Muse­um in 1925, after the expul­sion of Chi­na’s last emper­or Puyi, the Nation­al Palace Muse­um began its col­lec­tion with valu­ables belong­ing to the for­mer Impe­r­i­al fam­i­ly. Now, writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Claire Voon, it boasts “one of the largest troves of ancient Chi­nese impe­r­i­al arti­facts, from paint­ings to rare books to all sorts of objects made of jade, bronze, ceram­ic, and more.”

The dig­i­ti­za­tion and upload­ing project, called Nation­al Palace Muse­um Open Data, offers an Eng­lish ver­sion site, “although that is cur­rent­ly a rather lim­it­ed and incom­plete resource. The Chi­nese ver­sion fea­tures two por­tals to more effi­cient­ly comb through the museum’s relics. One is specif­i­cal­ly for paint­ing and cal­lig­ra­phy works; the oth­er, for every­thing else.”

Still, the Nation­al Palace Muse­um has been improv­ing its Eng­lish por­tal, which allows search­es not just by cat­e­go­ry of object but by dynasty, a list that now reach­es far beyond the Ming and Qing, all the way back to the Shang Dynasty of 1600 BC to 1046 BC. But even as the Eng­lish ver­sion catch­es up to the Chi­nese one — as of this writ­ing, it con­tains more than 4700 items — it will sure­ly take some time before Nation­al Palace Muse­um Open Data catch­es up with the com­plete hold­ings of the Nation­al Palace Muse­um, with its per­ma­nent col­lec­tion of about 700,000 Chi­nese impe­r­i­al arti­facts and art­works span­ning eight mil­len­nia. As with Chi­nese his­to­ry itself, a for­mi­da­ble sub­ject of study if ever there was one, it has to be tak­en one piece at a time.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online

The World’s Old­est Mul­ti­col­or Book, a 1633 Chi­nese Cal­lig­ra­phy & Paint­ing Man­u­al, Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online

Pre-Flight Safe­ty Demon­stra­tion Gets Per­formed as a Mod­ern Dance: A Cre­ative Video from a Tai­wanese Air­line

China’s New Lumi­nous White Library: A Strik­ing Visu­al Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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