Last Friday saw the launch of The Digital Einstein Papers. Hosted by Princeton University Press, the web site gives web users free, online access to the The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.
To date, 13 volumes of Einstein’s writing (or 7,000 pages from 2,900 documents) have been published, and they all now appear in electronic format on the Digital Einstein site. Eventually, a total of 30,000 documents will get uploaded to the digital collection.
The initial trove features, says Princeton University Press, “the writings and correspondence of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) from his youth [through] 1923.” And it includes things like: Einstein’s love letters, the notebook in which he worked out the general theory of relativity, and this gem of a letter (found by Vox) where Einstein counseled Marie Curie on how to deal with the trolls of last century.
The texts are all presented in the original language in which they were written. Many have in-depth English language annotations, and generally readers can toggle to an English language translation of the documents.
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What is the current state of jazz, you ask? You might ask genre-bending musician/producer/rapper Stephen Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, who also happens to be the nephew of John and Alice Coltrane. In a recent interview, Ellison lamented “it’s all gone quite stale over the past 20 years” and imagined that if Miles Davis “came back to Earth and heard a lot of these jazz cats, he’d be mad. He’d literally be mad, and he’d just go back to where he was dead at.” Given Miles’ infamous temper and disdain for the conventional, this isn’t hard to imagine at all. But whether you could call today’s jazz “elevator music” is a point I leave to others to debate.
Ah, but what is the state of digital jazz preservation? Now, that is a question I can answer, at least in some small part, by pointing you toward Jazz on the Tube. This online resource bills itself as three wonderful things in one: “a searchable database of thousands of carefully hand picked and annotated jazz videos”; “free Video-of-the-Day service”; and “up-to-date directory of jazz clubs, jazz festivals, and jazz organizations world-wide.” You’ll also find there podcasts and worldwide listings of jazz radio stations. But as its title implies, its most fulsome service offers a list of 2,000 videos from an A‑Z of several hundred artists—Abbey Lincoln to Zoot Sims.
Fancy some of that never-complacent Miles Davis magic? Check him out at the top doing “Sanctuary/Spanish Key” in 1970 at the Fillmore (opening for Santana—he also opened for Neil Young and the Grateful Dead that year). Dig some classic hard bop? Check out the Thelonious Monk Quartet in Poland, 1966. Like that N’Orleans’ sound? Do not miss Bunk Johnson below.
Whether it’s the avant-funk jazz stylings of contemporary trio Medeski, Martin & Wood or the trad big band swing of Cab Calloway you seek, at Jazz on the Tube, you will most surely find them. The breadth of artists, styles, and periods represented demonstrates the incredible range and adaptability of jazz. If it’s truly gone stale these days, I think we may anticipate that jazz will eventually find new forms its worthy ancestors approve of.
Perhaps you will fall in love with Jazz on the Tube. Perhaps you may find that it’s exactly what you need. If so, you should know that they also need you. Although their impressive archive of content is “all free to you,” it is not free for them to produce and maintain. They are currently asking help in the form of monthly memberships or one-time donations. Given the amount of curatorial work they’ve put into this digital jazz database, and how much enjoyment it’s likely to bring you, it seems only fair to give back to what they proudly describe as a “labor of love.”
A quick note: Nature announced yesterday that it will make all of its articles free to view, read, and annotate online. That applies to the historic science journal (launched in 1869) and to 48 other scientific journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG). Other titles include Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics.
All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded… The content-sharing policy … marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving NPG’s primary source of income — the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles.
But wait, there are a few more caveats. The archives will be made available to subscribers (e.g., researchers at universities) as well as 100 media outlets and blogs, and they can then share the articles (as read-only PDFs) with the rest of the world. This is all part of a one-year experiment.
The Darwinian theory of evolution is an amazing scientific idea that seems, at least to a layperson like me, to meet all the criteria for what scientists like Ian Glynn praise highly as “elegance”—all of them perhaps except one: Simplicity. Evolutionary theory may seem on its face to be a fairly simple explanation of the facts—all life begins as single-celled organisms, then changes and adapts in response to its environment, branching and developing into millions of species over billions of years. But the journey Darwin took to arrive at this idea was hardly straightforward and it certainly didn’t arrive in one eureka moment of enlightenment.
The process for him took over two decades, represented by the hundreds of pages of notes he left behind, all of which will be freely available online at the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History in 2015. This means 30,000 digitized documents, like the naturalist’s first “Tree of Life” at the top of the page, from a July 1837 notebook entry, and Transmutation Notebook D above, the first notebook in which Darwin began working on the theory of natural selection.
The Museum has currently announced that it is a little over the halfway point, with just over 16,000 digitized documents that cover, they write, “the 25-year period in which Darwin became convinced of evolution; discovered natural selection; developed explanations of adaptation, speciation, and a branching tree of life and wrote the Origin [of Species].” Director of the project David Kohn describes that latter famous work as “the mature fruit of a prolonged process of scientific exploration and creativity that began toward the end of his Beagle voyage… and that continued to expand in range and deepen in conceptual rigor through numerous well-marked stages.”
Now historians of science can trace those stages as though they were a fossil record, starting with that famous H.M.S. Beagle voyage, in which the young Darwin sailed from South America to the Pacific Islands—stopping at numerous sites, including the Galapagos Islands of course, and collecting samples and making observations. The journey produced a lively account, 1839’s Voyage of the Beagle, prelude to the fully developed theory presented 20 years later in On the Origin of Species. Looking into the Beagle voyage section, you’ll find hundreds of pages of notes, like that above on Galapagos mockingbirds. Darwin’s handwriting will present a challenge, which is why, Hyperallergic tells us, the project is “adding transcriptions and a scholarly structure to its high-resolution images.”
Hyperallergic also sums up the remaining contents of the huge archive, which in addition to the Beagle material will feature everything “from the rest of his life, which he spent defending his work.” This means “scribblings in books he studied, abstracts, his own book drafts, articles and their revisions, journals he read, and his notebooks on transmutation.” You’ll also find “some charming oddities” like drawings by the scientist’s children (above) on the back of original Origin manuscript pages. Learn much more about the archive, and Darwin’s lifelong work, at the American Museum of Natural History’s Darwin Manuscript Project site.
Digital photography has bestowed many gifts, and some few horrors: selfies, naturally, as well as even less dignified self-portraits, of the sort certain politicians send out; mass surveillance, as well as the ability of average citizens to produce important pieces of evidence and to document history; hard times for professional photographers, as well as the full democratization of the medium. What it has almost rendered obsolete is the mechanism that enabled photographic images in the first place. In place of cameras, we have smartphones, the hated Glass… maybe sometime in the future no external device at all. Given this trajectory, it’s entirely understandable that all sorts of people—steampunks, antiquarians, Luddites, analog fetishists, middle-age hipsters, etc.—would grow nostalgic not only for the cracked, striated monochrome patina of vintage photographs, but also for the boxes—large and small, simple and highly complicated—that produced them.
And what wonderful boxes they were! Before the onslaught of identical, cheap consumer point-and-shoots and (gasp!) disposables, or the utilitarian bricks of professional gear, the camera was very often a work of art in its own right. Today, we bring you a sampling of these objets—elegant, intricate, streamlined, and downright adorable. These are but a tiny fraction of the vintage camera treasures you’ll find represented at Collection Appareils, an online reference of 10,000 analog cameras run by Sylvain Halgand, a Frenchman sorely afflicted with the “insidious disease” of collecting.
Witness at the top the Photosphere No. 1, manufactured by the Compagnie Francaise de Photographie in 1899—a truly beautiful artifact. No less stylish, but far more camera-like to our eyes, see the Argus A above. Made in the U.S. between 1936 and 1941, this may have been the most popular 35mm of all time. Though not as well known as the Leica A, “it’s a safe bet that Argus sold more cameras in their first twenty years than Leica has sold in their first 70 years.”
Above, we have the first “point and shoot,” the Gap Box 6x9, a curiously attractive device made in France in 1950. This camera “played a very important role by making photography accessible to the general public,” allowing “anyone to take pictures at the lowest price and in the most simple way.”
Then there are the stylized and the streamlined. Just above, see a very fine machine called The Compass, manufactured by Swiss watchmaker Le Coultre between 1937 and 1940. And below, gaze upon the graceful Haneel Tri-Vision, made in Los Angeles in 1946.
Almost equally appealing in their design simplicity are the irresistibly cute miniature cameras, such as the “Mickey Mouse” below. Manufactured in Germany in 1958, these tiny things—despite the “copyright” notice on the lens—may have disappeared quickly “due to them not actually being sanctioned by the Disney Corporation.” They were, however, sold with a “large cardboard Mickey Mouse that ‘held’ the camera.”
See also the Coronet Midget. Made in England in 1934, this 5‑shilling camera “must be one of the most popular of all small cameras to collect.” The company marketed its own 6‑exposure film for the Midget, which came in a choice of five colors.
From the couture to the high-tech to the quirky and inventive (like the Lark “Sardine Can” below), the French vintage camera archive makes available a visual history of the camera that may exist nowhere else. It is the history of an object that defined the 20th century, and that may fully disappear sometime soon in the 21st. And while we can spend several hours a day marveling over the products of these fine devices, it’s a rare treat to see the things themselves in such an astonishing variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and degrees of design ingenuity. Take some time to get acquainted with the evolution of the handheld camera before digital technology finally renders it extinct.
Founded by William Phillips and Philip Rahv in February of 1934, leftist arts and politics magazine Partisan Review came about initially as an alternative to the American Communist Party’s publication, New Masses. While Partisan Review (PR) published many a Marxist writer, its politics diverged sharply from communism with the rise of Stalin. Perhaps this turn ensured the magazine’s almost 70-year run from ’34 to 2003, while New Masses folded in 1948. Partisan Review nonetheless remained a venue for some very heated political conversations (see more on which below), yet it has equally, if not more so, been known as one of the foremost literary journals of the 20th century.
PR first published James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” in Summer 1957 and two of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in 1940, for example, as well as Delmore Schwartz’s brilliant story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” in a 1937 issue that also featured Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, Pablo Picasso (writing on Franco), James Agee, and Mary McCarthy. “More a literary event,” writes Robin Hemley at The Believer, “than a literary magazine,” even issues sixty or more years old can still carry “the punch of revelation.”
Now you can assess the impact of that punch by accessing all 70-years’ worth of issues online at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. BU began hosting the magazine in 1978 after it moved from Rutgers, where founding editor William Phillips taught. Now the university has finished digitizing the entire collection, in handsome scans of vintage copies that readers can page through like an actual magazine. The collection is searchable, though this function is a little clunky (all links here direct you to the front cover of the issue. You’ll have to navigate to the actual pages yourself.)
In a post on the Gotlieb Center project, Hyperallergic points us toward a few more highlights:
In art, Partisan Review is perhaps best known as the publisher of Clement Greenberg, who contributed over 30 articles from 1939 to 1981, most notably his Summer 1939 essay entitled “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” (Greenberg even made a posthumous appearance in the Spring 1999 issue.) Beyond Greenberg’s voluble legacy we encounter such landmark texts as Dwight Macdonald’s “Masscult and Midcult,” from the Spring 1960 issue, and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” from Winter 1964, as well as the seminal popular-culture criticism of Robert Warshow (his essay on the Krazy Kat comic strip in the November-December 1946 issue is especially great) and the work of Hilton Kramer, the conservative iconoclast who went on to found The New Criterion.
Partisan Review also served as an outlet for George Orwell, who lambasted leftist pacifists—calling them, more or less, fascist sympathizers—in his series of articles between January 1941 and the summer of 1946, which he called “London Letters.” Orwell did not hesitate to name names; he also reported in 1945 of the “most enormous crimes and disasters” committed by the Soviets, including “purges, deportations, massacres, famines, imprisonment without trial, aggressive wars, broken treaties….” These things, Orwell remarked “not only fail to excite the big public, but can actually escape notice altogether.”
Partisan Review, however, was not aimed at “the big public.” Its “rarified principles,” writes Sam Tanenhaus of Slate—who calls PR “Trotskyist” for its interventionist boosterism—“attracted only 15,000 subscribers at its peak.”PR began in the age of the “little magazine,” a “term of honor” for the small journals that nurtured the high culture of their day, and which seem now so antiquated even as beleaguered publishers keep pushing them out to preciously small cliques of devoted readers. But charges of elitism can ring hollow, and given all we have to thank “little magazines” like Partisan Review for, it would probably behoove to pay attention to their successors. Enter the archive here.
The images came to Stanford as a gift from the Revs Institute for Automotive Research, located in Naples, Florida. If you’d like a quick primer on finding and gathering information about vintage cars in the archive, watch the introductory video below. It’ll teach you how to sift through the digital library in rapid fashion.
The images above come from the Revs Digital Library.
During the Great Depression, The Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) hired photographers to travel across America to document the poverty that gripped the nation, hoping to build support for New Deal programs being championed by F.D.R.‘s administration.
Legendary photographers like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein took part in what amounted to the largest photography project ever sponsored by the federal government. All told, 170,000 photographs were taken, then catalogued back in Washington DC. The Library of Congress became their eventual resting place.
Yale University has launched Photogrammar, a sophisticated web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing these 170,000 historic photographs.
Photogrammar also offers a handy interactive map that lets you gather geographical information about 90,000 photographs in the collection.
And then there’s a section called Photogrammar Labs where innovative visualization techniques and data experiments will gradually shed new light on the image archive.
Top image: A migrant agricultural worker in Marysville migrant camp, trying to figure out his year’s earnings. Taken in California in 1935 by Dorothea Lange.
Second image: Allie Mae Burroughs, wife of cotton sharecropper. Photo taken in Hale County, Alabama in 1935 by Walker Evans.
Third image: Wife and children of sharecropper in Washington County, Arkansas. By Arthur Rothstein. 1935.
Fourth image: Wife of Negro sharecropper, Lee County, Mississippi. Again taken by Arthur Rothstein in 1935.
Bottom image: Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Taken by Dorothea Lange in Nipomo, California, 1936.
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