Radiooooo: Discover the Musical Time Machine That Lets You Hear What Played on the Radio in Different Times & Places

in History, Music, Radio, Technology | April 13th, 2018

Radio has always been a fair­ly trans­portive medi­um.

Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, entire fam­i­lies clus­tered round the elec­tron­ic hearth to enjoy a vari­ety of enter­tain­ments, includ­ing live remote broad­casts from the glam­orous night­clubs and hotels where celebri­ty band­lead­ers like Count Basie and Duke Elling­ton held sway.

1950s teens’ tran­sis­tors took them to a head space less square than the white bread sub­urbs their par­ents inhab­it­ed.

Dur­ing the Viet­nam War, South Viet­namese sta­tions played home­grown ren­di­tions of the rock and soul sounds dom­i­nat­ing Amer­i­can air­waves.

The Radiooooo.com site (there’s also a ver­sion avail­able for the iPhone and Android) allows mod­ern lis­ten­ers to expe­ri­ence a bit of that mag­i­cal time trav­el­ing sen­sa­tion, via an inter­ac­tive map that allows you to tune in to spe­cif­ic coun­tries and decades.

The con­tent here is user-gen­er­at­ed. Reg­is­ter for a free account, and you too can begin shar­ing eccen­tric faves.

Find a user whose tastes mir­ror your own? Click their pro­file for a stat card of tracks they’ve favor­it­ed and uploaded, as well as any oth­er sundry details they may feel like shar­ing, such as coun­try of ori­gin and age.

There are fun awards to be earned here, with the most sought after pelts going to the first to upload a song to an emp­ty coun­try, or upload a track from 1910–1920. (Cameroon, 1940 … go!)

As with an actu­al radio, you are not select­ing the actu­al playlist, though you can nudge the nee­dle a bit by tog­gling to your desired mood—slow, fast and/or weird.

And you need not lim­it your­self to a sin­gle des­ti­na­tion. Embark on a strange musi­cal trip by using Radiooooo’s taxi func­tion to car­ry you to mul­ti­ple coun­tries and decades. (I closed my eyes and wound up shut­tling between Ukraine and Mau­ri­ta­nia in the 60s and 80s.)

Dot­ted around the map are island icons, where the ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion is sort­ed accord­ing to themes like Hawaii, Nev­er­land (“for chil­dren big and small”), and 8‑Bit video game music. Le Club, float­ing mid­way between Europe and North Amer­i­ca, con­tains brand new releas­es from con­tem­po­rary labels.

The Now Play­ing win­dow includes an option to buy, when pos­si­ble, as well as the artist’s name and album art­work. Share, like, get your groove on…

And stay tuned for Radiooooo’s lat­est baby, Le Globe, an inter­ac­tive 3‑D map of the world and a decade selec­tor dial mount­ed on a “beau­ti­ful con­nect­ed object.”

The bound­aries are extreme­ly per­me­able here.

Have a browse through Radiooooo’s Insta­gram feed for a feast of cov­er art or head to France for one of their in-per­son lis­ten­ing par­ties. (There’s one next week in the secret lis­ten­ing room of Paris’ Grand Hotel Amour.)

Read­ers, if your explo­rations unearth an excep­tion­al track, please share it in the com­ments, below.

Down­load the Radioooo app for Mac or Android here, or lis­ten on the web­site. (You may need to fool around with var­i­ous browsers to find the one that works best for you.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 1,500+ Gen­res of Music, All Mapped Out on an Insane­ly Thor­ough Inter­ac­tive Graph

Behold the MusicMap: The Ulti­mate Inter­ac­tive Geneal­o­gy of Music Cre­at­ed Between 1870 and 2016

Google’s Music Time­line: A Visu­al­iza­tion of 60 Years of Chang­ing Musi­cal Tastes

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her radio dial is set to Roma­nia 1910 in antic­i­pa­tion of the third install­ment of her lit­er­ary-themed vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain , Mon­day, April 23 at the New York Soci­ety Library. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Ancient Ruins Get Restored to their Glorious Original State with Animated GIFs: The Temple of Jupiter, Luxor Temple & More

in Architecture, History | April 13th, 2018

The “sev­en won­ders of the world”: all of us have all heard the phrase so many times, but can we name the spe­cif­ic won­ders to which it refers? Though the list took its final form in the Renais­sance, it orig­i­nates all the way back with the ancient Greeks who want­ed a sense of the most majes­tic man-made land­marks that lay with­in their ter­ri­to­ry. These were even­tu­al­ly nar­rowed down to the Great Pyra­mid of Giza, the Hang­ing Gar­dens of Baby­lon (whether they real­ly exist­ed or not), the Tem­ple of Artemis at Eph­esus, the Stat­ue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mau­soleum at Hali­car­nas­sus, the Colos­sus of Rhodes, and the Light­house of Alexan­dria.

Today we offer you an alter­na­tive set of ancient won­ders, made even more won­drous by a tech­nol­o­gy whol­ly unimag­in­able to ancient Greeks: the ani­mat­ed GIF. You see here four of the set, which in total includes the Parthenon in Greece, the Pyra­mid of the Sun and the Nohoch Mul Pyra­mid in Mex­i­co, the Tem­ple of Lago Argenti­na in Rome, the Tem­ple of Lux­or in Egypt, the Tem­ple of Jupiter in Italy, and Hadri­an’s Wall in Eng­land.

The GIFS, which trace the lines of the orig­i­nal struc­tures over the ruins and then fill them in pho­to­re­al­is­tic detail, are the work of hus­band-wife team Maja Wrońs­ka and Prze­mek Sobiec­ki.

“Despite their ‘ruinous’ con­di­tion, these struc­tures have influ­enced many of history’s great archi­tects, and con­tin­ue to be an inspi­ra­tion today,” writes Design­boom’s Rob Reu­land. “These sites have been deplet­ed by time and by con­quest, parts are reused, oth­ers just fall away with neglect. See­ing them restored is a bit like hop­ping in the Delore­an and crank­ing the flux capac­i­tor, and revers­ing their slow decay.” And as a com­menter adds below, “the next thing would be this in com­bi­na­tion with AR-glass­es while vis­it­ing the site” — the ongo­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion, in oth­er words, of the won­ders of the ancient world and the won­ders of the mod­ern one. See all sev­en of the ani­mat­ed GIFs here.

via Expe­dia/design­boom

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

How the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Were Built: A New The­o­ry in 3D Ani­ma­tion

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

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

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

in History, Maps | April 12th, 2018

We’ve all seen that famous New York­er cov­er sat­i­riz­ing a New York­er’s dis­tort­ed, self-cen­tered view of the world: Man­hat­tan occu­pies a good half of the image, rel­e­gat­ing the rest of Amer­i­ca (and indeed the world) to the sta­tus of out­er-out­er bor­oughs. What Saul Stein­berg did with a draw­ing in 1976, pio­neer­ing Roman geo­g­ra­ph­er Pom­po­nius Mela had done, in a much less comedic but much more accu­rate way, with text nine­teen cen­turies before. Writ­ing from his per­spec­tive under the reign of the Emper­or Gaius, Claudius, or both, Mela cre­at­ed noth­ing less than a world­view, which tells us now how the ancient Romans con­ceived of the world around them, its char­ac­ter­is­tics and its rela­tion­ship to the ter­ri­to­ry of the might­i­est empire going.

“Pom­po­nius Mela is a puz­zle, and so is his one known work, The Chorog­ra­phy,” writes Frank E. Romer in Pom­po­nius Mela’s Descrip­tion of the World. In that series of three books, which seems not to have con­tained any maps itself, Mela divides the Earth into two rough “hemi­spheres” and five zones, two of them cold, one of them hot, and two in between.

Pulling togeth­er what in his day con­sti­tut­ed a wealth of geo­graph­i­cal knowl­edge from a vari­ety of pre­vi­ous sources, he paint­ed a word-pic­ture of the world more accu­rate, on the whole, than any writ­ten down before. Schol­ars since have also praised Mela’s clear, acces­si­ble prose style — clear and acces­si­ble, in any case, for a first-cen­tu­ry text com­posed in Latin.

Var­i­ous maps, includ­ing the 1898 repro­duc­tion pic­tured at the top of the post (see it in a larg­er for­mat here), have attempt­ed to visu­al­ize Mela’s world­view and make it leg­i­ble at a glance. You can see more ver­sions at Cartographic-images.net, and the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion shows the world accord­ing to Mela placed along­side the world accord­ing to Ptole­my and the world accord­ing to Diony­sius Periegetes. Though Mela showed greater insight into the inte­gra­tion of the var­i­ous parts of the world known to the ancient Romans than did his pre­de­ces­sors, he also, of course, had his blind spots and rough areas, includ­ing the assump­tion that human beings could only live in the two most tem­per­ate of the cli­mat­ic zones he defined. Even so, the maps derived from his work pro­vide an infor­ma­tive glimpse of how, exact­ly, Romans saw their place in the world — or rather how, exact­ly, they saw their place in the cen­ter of it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The Largest Ear­ly Map of the World Gets Assem­bled for the First Time: See the Huge, Detailed & Fan­tas­ti­cal World Map from 1587

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

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Is Now Free Online

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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Artists Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico: Vintage Footage from 1938

in Art, History | April 11th, 2018


Here’s some very rare footage of the great Mex­i­can painters Diego Rivera and Fri­da Kahlo pay­ing a vis­it to exiled Sovi­et rev­o­lu­tion­ary Leon Trot­sky and his wife, Natalia Sedo­va, in Coy­ocoán, Mex­i­co, in 1938.

The Trot­skys had arrived the year before, after Rivera peti­tioned the gov­ern­ment of Pres­i­dent Lázaro Cár­de­nas to grant the con­tro­ver­sial Marx­ist leader and the­o­rist sanc­tu­ary in Mex­i­co. When the Trot­skys arrived on a Nor­we­gian oil tanker at the port city of Tampi­co in Jan­u­ary of 1937, Rivera was not well, but Kahlo board­ed the ship to wel­come the Trot­skys and accom­pa­nied them on an armored train to Mex­i­co City. She invit­ed the Trot­skys to stay at her fam­i­ly home, La Casa Azul (the Blue House) in Coy­ocoán, now a sec­tion of Mex­i­co City. By the time this footage was tak­en by a vis­it­ing Amer­i­can named Ivan Heisler, Trot­sky and Kahlo had either had, or were about to have, a brief affair, and the friend­ship between the two cou­ples would soon fall apart. In ear­ly 1939 Trot­sky moved to anoth­er house in the same neigh­bor­hood, where he was assas­si­nat­ed in August of 1940.

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:

Watch Mov­ing Short Films of Fri­da Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the “Blue House”

The Fri­da Kahlo Action Fig­ure

Fri­da Kahlo Writes a Per­son­al Let­ter to Geor­gia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Ner­vous Break­down (1933)

1933 Arti­cle on Fri­da Kahlo: “Wife of the Mas­ter Mur­al Painter Glee­ful­ly Dab­bles in Works of Art”

Attempt­ing to Set the World Record for Most Fri­da Kahlo Looka­likes in One Place: It Hap­pened in Dal­las

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Help a Library Transcribe Magical Manuscripts & Recover the Charms, Potions & Witchcraft That Flourished in Early Modern Europe and America

in Books, History, Religion, Science | April 11th, 2018

Mag­ic is real—hear me out. No, you can’t solve life’s prob­lems with a wand and made-up Latin. But there are aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments of mag­ic, only they go by dif­fer­ent names now. A few hun­dred years ago the dif­fer­ence between chem­istry and alche­my was nil. Witch­craft involved as much botany as spell­work. A lot of fun bits of mag­ic got weed­ed out when gen­tle­men in pow­dered wigs purged weird sis­ters and gnos­tic heretics from the field. Did the old spells work? Maybe, maybe not. Sci­ence has become pret­ty reli­able, I guess. Stan­dard­ized clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems and mea­sure­ments are okay, but yawn… don’t we long for some witch­ing and wiz­ard­ing? A well-placed hex might work won­ders.

Say no more, we’ve got you cov­ered: you, yes you, can learn charms and potions, demonolo­gy and oth­er assort­ed dark arts. How? For a one­time fee of absolute­ly noth­ing, you can enter mag­i­cal books from the Ear­ly Mod­ern Peri­od.

T’was a ver­i­ta­ble gold­en age of mag­ic, when wiz­ard­ing sci­en­tists like John Dee—Queen Eliz­a­beth’s sooth­say­ing astrologer and reveal­er of the lan­guage of the angels—burned bright­ly just before they were extin­guished, or run under­ground, by ortho­dox­ies of all sorts. The New­ber­ry, “Chicago’s Inde­pen­dent Research Library Since 1887,” has reached out to the crowds to help “unlock the mys­ter­ies” of rare man­u­scripts and bring the diver­si­ty of the time alive.

The library’s Tran­scrib­ing Faith ini­tia­tive gives users a chance to con­nect with texts like The Book of Mag­i­cal Charms (above), by tran­scrib­ing and/or trans­lat­ing the con­tents there­in. Like soft­ware engi­neer Joseph Peterson—founder of the Eso­teric Archives, which con­tains a large col­lec­tion of John Dee’s work—you can vol­un­teer to help the Newberry’s project “Reli­gious Change, 1450–1700.” The New­ber­ry aims to edu­cate the gen­er­al pub­lic on a peri­od of immense upheaval. “The Ref­or­ma­tion and the Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tion are very big, cap­i­tal let­ter con­cepts,” project coor­di­na­tor Christo­pher Fletch­er tells Smithsonian.com, “we lose sight of the fact that these were real events that hap­pened to real peo­ple.”

By aim­ing to return these texts to “real peo­ple” on the inter­net, the New­ber­ry hopes to demys­ti­fy, so to speak, key moments in Euro­pean his­to­ry. “You don’t need a Ph.D. to tran­scribe,” Fletch­er points out. Atlas Obscu­ra describes the process as “much like updat­ing a Wikipedia page,” only “any­one can start tran­scrib­ing and trans­lat­ing and they don’t need to sign up to do so.” Check out some tran­scrip­tions of The Book of Mag­i­cal Charms—writ­ten by var­i­ous anony­mous authors in the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry—here. The book, writes the New­ber­ry, describes “every­thing from speak­ing with spir­its to cheat­ing at dice to cur­ing a toothache.”

Need to call up a spir­it for some dirty work? Just fol­low the instruc­tions below:

Call their names Ori­moth, Bel­moth Limoc and Say thus. I con­jure you by the neims of the Angels + Sator and Azamor that yee intend to me in this Aore, and Send unto me a Spirite called Sag­rigid that doe full­fill my comand­ng and desire and that can also undar­stand my words for one or 2 yuares; or as long as I will.

Seems sim­ple enough, but of course this busi­ness did not sit well with some pow­er­ful peo­ple, includ­ing one Increase Math­er, father of Cot­ton, pres­i­dent of Har­vard, best known from his work on the Salem Witch Tri­als. Increase defend­ed the pros­e­cu­tions in a man­u­script titled Cas­es of Con­science Con­cern­ing Evil Spir­its, a page from which you can see fur­ther up. The text reads, in part:

an Evi­dence Sup­posed to be in the Tes­ti­mo­ny
which is throw­ly to be Weighed, & if it doe
not infal­li­bly prove the Crime against the
per­son accused, it ought not to deter­mine
him Guilty of it for So right­eous may
be con­demned unjust­ly.

Math­er did not con­sid­er these to be show tri­als or “witch­hunts” but rather the fair and judi­cious appli­ca­tion of due process, for what­ev­er that’s worth. Else­where in the text he famous­ly wrote, “It were bet­ter that Ten Sus­pect­ed Witch­es should escape, than that one Inno­cent Per­son should be Con­demned.” Cold com­fort to those con­demned as guilty for like­ly prac­tic­ing some mix of reli­gion and ear­ly sci­ence.

These texts are writ­ten in Eng­lish and con­cern them­selves with mag­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al mat­ters express­ly. Oth­er man­u­scripts in the project’s archive roam more broad­ly across top­ics and lan­guages, and “shed light on the entwined prac­tices of reli­gion and read­ing.” One “com­mon­place book,” for exam­ple (above), from some­time between 1590 and 1620, con­tains ser­mons by John Donne as well as “reli­gious, polit­i­cal, and prac­ti­cal texts, includ­ing a Mid­dle Eng­lish lyric,” all care­ful­ly writ­ten out by an Eng­lish scribe named Hen­ry Feilde in order to prac­tice his cal­lig­ra­phy.

Anoth­er such text, large­ly in Latin, “may have been start­ed as ear­ly as the 16th cen­tu­ry, but con­tin­ued to be used and added to well into the 19th cen­tu­ry. Its com­pil­ers expressed inter­est in a wide range of top­ics, from reli­gious and moral ques­tions to the lib­er­al arts to strange events.” Books like these “reflect­ed the read­ing habits of ear­ly mod­ern peo­ple, who tend­ed not to read books from begin­ning to end, but instead to dip in and out of them,” extract­ing bits and bobs of wis­dom, quo­ta­tions, recipes, prayers, and even the odd spell or two.

The final work in need of transcription/translation is also the only print­ed text, or texts, rather, a col­lec­tion of Ital­ian reli­gious broad­sides, adver­tis­ing “pub­lic cel­e­bra­tions and com­mem­o­ra­tions of Catholic feast days and oth­er reli­gious occa­sions.” Hard­ly sum­mon­ing spir­its, though some may beg to dif­fer. If you’re so inclined to take part in open­ing the secrets of these rare books for lay read­ers every­where, vis­it Tran­scrib­ing Faith here and get to work.

via Smith­son­ian/ Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,600 Occult Books Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online, Thanks to the Rit­man Library and Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Myth­i­cal ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Is Being Dig­i­tized & Put Online (Along with His Oth­er Alche­my Man­u­scripts)

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

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Behold 3,000 Digitized Manuscripts from the Bibliotheca Palatina: The Mother of All Medieval Libraries Is Getting Reconstructed Online

in Books, History | April 9th, 2018

The inter­net, one occa­sion­al­ly hears, has over­tak­en the func­tion of the library. In terms of stor­ing and mak­ing acces­si­ble all of human knowl­edge, the ways in which the capac­i­ties of the inter­net match or exceed those of even the most enor­mous library seem obvi­ous. In the­o­ry, dig­i­tal libraries don’t burn down, at least when prop­er­ly set up, nor, with their abil­i­ty to exist above nation­al bound­aries, do they get sacked by invad­ing armies. Even so, as Google recent­ly proved when its years-long book-dig­i­ti­za­tion effort Project Ocean came up against legal obsta­cles, the phys­i­cal realm has­n’t quite ced­ed to the online one.

“When the library at Alexan­dria burned it was said to be an ‘inter­na­tion­al cat­a­stro­phe,’ ” writes The Atlantic’s James Somers in a piece on the ambi­tious, trou­bled project. When the court ruled against Google’s ver­sion, though, few­er tears were shed.

At least when Hei­del­berg’s Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na, the most impor­tant library of the Ger­main Renais­sance, became a piece of booty in the Thir­ty Years’ War in 1622, its 5,000 print­ed books and 3,524 man­u­scripts remained, in some sense, avail­able — albeit split, from then on, between Hei­del­berg and the Vat­i­can’s Bib­liote­ca Apos­toli­ca Vat­i­cana.

“At the begin­ning of the 17th cen­tu­ry,” says Medievalists.net, the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na “was known as ‘the great­est trea­sure of Germany’s learned.’ As a uni­ver­sal library, it con­tains not only the­o­log­i­cal, philo­log­i­cal, philo­soph­i­cal, and his­tor­i­cal works but also med­ical, nat­ur­al his­to­ry, and astro­nom­i­cal texts.” Now, its “core inven­to­ry” of approx­i­mate­ly 3,000 man­u­scripts has become avail­able free online at the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na Dig­i­tal. Since 2001, says its site, “Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty Library has been work­ing on sev­er­al projects that aim to dig­i­tize parts of this great col­lec­tion, the final goal being a com­plete vir­tu­al recon­struc­tion of the ‘moth­er of all libraries.’ ”

From there you can browse the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na Dig­i­tal’s Codices Pala­ti­ni ger­mani­ci, “the largest and old­est undi­vid­ed col­lec­tion of extant Ger­man-lan­guage man­u­scripts”; the Codices Pala­ti­ni lati­ni, where “you will even­tu­al­ly be able to access more than 2,000 Latin man­u­scripts”; and the Codices Pala­ti­ni grae­ci, which hous­es “dig­i­tal fac­sim­i­les of 29 Greek man­u­scripts which are now kept in Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty Library.” It also offers sec­tions on the his­to­ry of the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na; on the Codex Manesse, “the world’s rich­est anthol­o­gy of medi­ae­val Ger­man song”; and (for now in Ger­man only) on the man­u­scripts’ dec­o­ra­tions and the insight they pro­vide into “the the­mat­i­cal­ly diverse art of medi­ae­val book-mak­ing.” And none of it sub­ject to sack­ing — unless, of course, his­to­ry has a par­tic­u­lar­ly nasty sur­prise in store for us.

Enter the Dig­i­tal Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Euro­peana Col­lec­tions, a Por­tal of 48 Mil­lion Free Art­works, Books, Videos, Arti­facts & Sounds from Across Europe

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

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

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 Genius of Harry Beck’s 1933 London Tube Map–and How It Revolutionized Subway Map Design Everywhere

in Design, History, Life, Maps, Travel | April 9th, 2018

The sub­way is a mar­vel of engi­neer­ing, and so is the mod­ern sub­way map.

For the first 25 years of its exis­tence, Lon­don Under­ground rid­ers relied on a map that reflect­ed the actu­al dis­tance between sta­tions, as well as rivers, parks, and oth­er above­ground phe­nom­e­na.

As design­er Michael Bierut observes in the video at the top, the rad­i­cal­ly revised approach it final­ly adopt­ed in 1933 proved so intu­itive and easy to use, it remains the uni­ver­sal tem­plate for mod­ern sub­way maps.

The brain­child of Har­ry Beck, a young drafts­man in the Lon­don Under­ground Sig­nals Office, the new map is more accu­rate­ly a dia­gram that pri­or­i­tized rid­ers’ needs.

He did away with all above­ground ref­er­ences save the Thames, and replot­ted the sta­tions at equidis­tant points along col­or-cod­ed straight lines.

This innovation—for which he was paid about $8—helped rid­ers to glean at a glance where to make the sub­ter­ranean con­nec­tions that would allow them to trav­el from point A to point B.

The for­mer senior cura­tor of Lon­don Trans­port Muse­um, Anna Ren­ton, said in an inter­view with The Verge that Beck’s design may have helped per­suade city dwellers to make the leap to sub­urbs ser­viced by the Under­ground “by mak­ing them look clos­er to the cen­ter, and show­ing how easy it was to com­mute.”

It’s not Beck’s fault if ser­vice falls short of his map’s effi­cient ide­al, par­tic­u­lar­ly on nights and week­ends, when track work and ser­vice advi­sories abound, ren­der­ing such com­mutes a night­mare.

The appeal of sub­way map-themed sou­venirs is also a tes­ta­ment to the visu­al appeal of Beck’s orig­i­nal design, espe­cial­ly giv­en that such pur­chas­es are not lim­it­ed to tourists.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ani­mat­ed GIFs Show How Sub­way Maps of Berlin, New York, Tokyo & Lon­don Com­pare to the Real Geog­ra­phy of Those Great Cities

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

The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, April 23 for the third install­ment of her lit­er­ary-themed vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Colorful Wood Block Prints from the Chinese Revolution of 1911: A Gallery of Artistic Propaganda Posters

in Art, History | April 6th, 2018

When you think Chi­nese Rev­o­lu­tion, sure­ly you think of Mao Zedong and the People’s Repub­lic com­ing to pow­er in 1949, a his­to­ry that over­shad­ows an ear­li­er seis­mic event that over­threw the last impe­r­i­al dynasty and brought the short-lived Repub­lic of Chi­na into being. If your sense of this his­to­ry is some­what vague, you’re not alone—even those who know the events and the prin­ci­ple actors well are hes­i­tant to ascribe any defin­i­tive inter­pre­ta­tions to the 1911, or Xin­hai, Rev­o­lu­tion. “Sig­nif­i­cant thinkers and activists have… remained hes­i­tant in their final judg­ment on it,” writes Oxford University’s Rana Mit­ter: “Its mean­ing con­tin­ues to be high­ly con­test­ed… sep­a­rat­ed from any one path of his­tor­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion.”

There is a gen­er­al con­sen­sus, at least, among his­to­ri­ans of the peri­od and con­tem­po­rary chron­i­clers alike that the Xin­hai Rev­o­lu­tion was fore­most a strug­gle to mod­ern­ize the coun­try and get free of colo­nial­ist encroach­ments on Chi­nese self-deter­mi­na­tion. As in Rus­sia around the same time, the con­cept of polit­i­cal mod­ern­iza­tion had many dif­fer­ent mean­ings to the com­pet­ing fac­tions seek­ing to sup­plant the mori­bund impe­r­i­al sys­tem.

“Some hoped for a con­sti­tu­tion­al frame­work, i.e., par­lia­men­tary monar­chy,” notes Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas pro­fes­sor Anna M. Cien­ciala, “while oth­ers worked for a demo­c­ra­t­ic repub­lic. Most want­ed the abo­li­tion of the feu­dal-Con­fu­cian sys­tem; all want­ed the abo­li­tion of for­eign priv­i­lege and the uni­fi­ca­tion of their vast coun­try.”

This last hope would be dashed. The strongest fac­tion suc­ceed­ed in gain­ing sup­port from wealthy Chi­nese liv­ing abroad, who fund­ed the efforts of rev­o­lu­tion­ary leader Sun Yat-sen, a med­ical doc­tor raised in Hawaii who began in the late 19th cen­tu­ry “to devote him­self to polit­i­cal work for the over­throw of the Qing Dynasty” in order to “cre­ate a strong, uni­fied, mod­ern, Chi­nese repub­lic” with a social­ist econ­o­my. Despite sup­port from the mil­i­tary, the Repub­lic estab­lished in 1912 “proved a mis­er­able fail­ure,” Cien­ciala argues, and the coun­try frag­ment­ed under the rule of var­i­ous war­lords, then suf­fered through sev­er­al more upheavals and an attempt­ed Qing restora­tion in the ensu­ing decades while the Com­mu­nists con­sol­i­dat­ed pow­er.

Look­ing back at the events at the time, his­to­ri­an Peter Zarrow has attempt­ed to trace “the moment when the Wuchang Upris­ing became the ‘rev­o­lu­tion’… that is when gen­er­al opin­ion began to regard it as a move­ment that could over­throw the Qing and estab­lish a new gov­ern­ment.” Opin­ions were large­ly shaped, he writes, by Shang­hai news­pa­pers cov­er­ing what Bri­tan­ni­ca Blog calls “a hasti­ly and local­ly orga­nized mutiny” that first began in one of the three areas that make up the city of Wuhan. In cre­at­ing the nar­ra­tive of events, news agen­cies “imme­di­ate­ly print­ed illus­trat­ed sheets for a Chi­nese pub­lic avid for the lat­est news.” So writes the Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Dig­i­tal Library, who house a col­lec­tion of 30 such prints, like­ly “based on upon artists’ imag­i­na­tion.”

News agency reports of the Wuchang Upris­ing and sub­se­quent bat­tles in cities across Chi­na “gen­er­al­ly sup­port the Rev­o­lu­tion as a mod­ern­iz­ing par­ty, and hence some demo­niza­tion of the ene­my occurs in the prints, as was usu­al for pro­pa­gan­da prints of that and ear­li­er peri­ods.” What is notable is the degree to which broad themes of “moder­ni­ty” and “nation” show up, cre­at­ing a tri­umphant sense of uni­ty that seems to have been exag­ger­at­ed.

But this is the way pro­pa­gan­da works, in 1911 and today—“manufacturing con­sent,” to take Noam Chomsky’s phrase. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to see it work in images that seem so quaint to us today, but which, at the time, pushed for­ward a rev­o­lu­tion­ary break with over two thou­sand years of dynas­tic rule.

See many more of these images at Princeton’s Dig­i­tal Library.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

14,000 Free Images from the French Rev­o­lu­tion Now Avail­able Online

Chi­na: Tra­di­tions and Trans­for­ma­tions (A Free Har­vard Course) 

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

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

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

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