This beauty, found in a random dump of Internet Archive books: a set of practice texts for (I think) reading shorthand, this one from 1851. Like alien language mixed with steampunk curly lettering.
Fraction Bars
A device for teaching fractions to the visually impaired, from the 1910 book “Der Blindenunterricht. Vorträge über Wesen, Methode und Ziel des Unterrichtes in der Blindenschule”, via Bitcraft Lab.
Glossary from “Old Mortality”
The “glossary” section from Sir Walter Scott’s book “Old Mortality, Volume 2”, what appears to be the oldest book in the Project Gutenberg collection of the Internet Archive. Not sure what it is supposed to be a glossary of, but a weird collection to be sure:
A’, all.
A’body, everybody.
Aboon, abune, above.
Ae, one.
Aff, off.
Afore, before.
Again, against, until.
Ahint, behind.
Ain, own.
Ajee, awry.
Amaist, almost.
Amna, am not.
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Every Unique Word in ‘usenet-com’
A list of every unique word in the ‘usenet-com’ Usenet archive from Internet Archive. Warning: very long post!
_
___
_____________________________
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__________eavesdropping____________________
_mn_main
?
?
??
?99
?berweisen
?berweisungstr?
?e
?gen
?ger
?line
?mchen
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Most Frequent Word Search
For the past few months I’ve been working on a curatorial project with the Internet Archive, to be released on their Tumblr account early next year. One of the experiments for this project searches the Internet Archive for a given term, downloads the first result, parses the most frequent word and uses that as a seed for the next search. For example:
seed > plants > leaves > chinese > heaven > minerva > questo
An interesting result: this process goes from general to more and more specific until no search results are found. This is actually an interesting opposite of my Wikipedia Loops project, where a similar algorithmic path goes from specific to general, eventually falling into a meta-loop.
The code for this experiment is available here: https://gist.github.com/jeffThompson/6718129
PDFs of Brightness, Sorted by Brightness
As an early experiment for a curatorial residency with the Internet Archive, I wrote some software that searches for all PDF texts on the site that contain the word “brightness” in their title or description, downloaded the files (approximately 900 PDFs), analyzed them and sorted them by overall brightness.
Above are the first pages of the brightest and darkest PDFs – a table with all the files and URLs is after the break. Download the source code here.
Solar Corona
A solar corona on June 8, 1918 from the Adolfo Stahl Lecture Series:
“From a photograph with the 40-foot camera of the Crocker Eclipse Expedition of the Lick Observatory to Goldendale, Washington. Exposure, 0m21s to 25s of totality. South is at the left, west at the top.”
Via a experiment in auto-curation for a residency at Internet Archive.