19thCentury
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Put a thousand books from the British Library on your iPad for free
I just love finding apps like this, and I think you'll be excited too. The British Library has released 1000 books from its 19th Century collection into a free iPad app that includes novels, historical works, poetry, philosophy and scientific books. The books have been scanned in high resolution and color so you can see the engraved illustrations, the beauty of the embossed covers, along with maps and even the texture of the paper the books were printed on. You can search the collection, browse titles by subject, and even read commentary on some of the titles. The books can be downloaded for reading offline. %Gallery-126197%
Google helps scholars mine 1.7 million Victorian era book titles for clues to our historical attitudes
Whether we like, loathe, or never even considered the idea of it, quantitative literary analysis seems ready for its moment in the spotlight. Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, a pair of historians of science over at George Mason University, have been playing around with the titles of some nearly 1.7 million books -- accounting for all the known volumes published in Britain during the 19th century -- in a search for enlightenment about the Victorian era's cultural trends and developments. By looking at how often certain words appear in text titles over time, they can find corroboration or perhaps even refutation for the commonly held theories about that time -- although they themselves warn that correlation isn't always indicative of causation. Their research has been made possible by Google's Books venture, which is busily digitizing just about every instance of the written word ever, and the next stage will be to try and mine the actual texts themselves for further clues about what our older selves thought about the world. Any bets on when the word "fail" was first used as a noun?
Giroux Daguerreotype is world's first mass-produced camera, about to become the most expensive one too
If you thought that shooters like Olympus' E-P1 or Leica's M8 had old school aesthetics, think again. The real old school -- we're talking 1839 here -- was all about wooden boxes and brass lens protrusions, as you can see above. The double box design of the Daguerreotype lets you achieve focus by moving the smaller inner box away from the front-mounted 15-inch lens. Exposure times can take up to half an hour, though, so you might wanna budget for a sturdy tripod as well. Speaking of budget, if you know the meaning of the word you're not probably not the target audience here, as a May auction in Vienna is set to start at €200,000 ($280,000), with predictions placing the final sale price closer to €700,000 ($980,000).
