Last week I had a terrible cold. So when I read about this new exhibit from the National Library of Medicine, I knew I had to write about it. (GAHCHOO!) Sorry.
The new exhibit is An Iconography of Contagion: A Web Exhibition of 20th-century Health Posters, and it’s available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/iconographyofcontagion/index.html. This exhibit is adapted from an exhibitition that was hosted by the National Academy of Sciences in 2008. There is explanatory text but the heart of the exhibit is about two dozen posters. The posters date from the 1920s to the 1990s, are from all over the world, and address a variety of health concerns.
Items include a 1935 poster from China about tuberculosis (summary: don’t spit on the sidewalk), an odd 1944 poster featuring a fly wearing shoes (many shoes) and a Kenyan poster about sleeping sickness. Posters not in English are translated.
This is a pretty brief exhibit (especially if you’re used to Library of Congress exhibits where you might see jillions of posters and prints in one place) but the commentary is good and the choices for the exhibit interesting.
I read an article in Wired last week that made me very happy: Popular Science is now online as entire archive, and it’s free! The magazine has teamed up with Google Books to make its archive available.
To search, you can start at http://www.popsci.com/archives, but I found the page a little narrow to go through the results. So I did a little messing around at Google Books and found that http://books.google.com/books?as_pt=MAGAZINES&q=intitle%3A%22popular%20science%22&rview=1 got me a cover view of 1,327 magazine results matching the title “Popular Science”. Or you can start with the Google Books query intitle:”popular science” and add any keywords in which you’re interested. (Make sure you go into advanced search and get your results from magazines only.) A cleaner URL to browse all issues is http://books.google.com/books/serial/HVhlMMQLVhcC?rview=1.
I did a search for intitle:”Popular Science” monsters and got 547 results, from “New evidence spurs hunt for Loch Ness monster‎” to “SPLIT Logs Easily, Without Expensive Splitters, Monster Mauls.” Results include a thumbnail of the cover and details about which issue it is. It doesn’t look like you can get results by order of date, which is unfortunate — looks like results are in order of relevance.
Results take you to individual pages with your search terms highlighted. May I please recommend the 1967 article “I used at real computer at home and so will you”.
Google Books (or in this case Magazines) still drives me a bit nuts because of the ways that you can’t sort results, and sometimes the “scrolling down” through the pages makes me overshoot things I want to read, but man, they’re adding some great content.
Good news for folks with hearing impairments and folks who don’t have hearing impairments but sometimes just can’t figure out what other people are saying (that would be me.) YouTube announced last week that YouTube videos (at least those in English which have voices clearly speaking and aren’t drowned out or muffled by background noises, music, etc.)
Apparently there are twenty hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute (which personally I find mindbending) so as you might imagine it’ll take a while for everything to be autocaptioned. I did some random searches (for things like lecture, speech, items that seemed like they would be better suited for autocaption) and didn’t come across much. I did find a lecture on the Theory of Relativity that had been captioned, so you can see what it looks like. Captions are at the bottom and a CC icon shows up in the tool bar at the bottom of the video.
You can click that icon to turn the captions on and off, but you can also change settings as well — you can change the size of the captions and also use an auto-translate feature to have the captions appear in another language. It’s machine translation, of course, so it won’t be perfect.
Speaking of that, the transcriptions are machine transcriptions as well — so you know they won’t be perfect either. Owners of posted
videos can download auto-generated captions, correct them, and upload new versions. If your videos have not been captioned yet, you can also request that they get the captioning treatment — a “Request Processing (English Only)” button lets you put your video in the queue, while YouTube assures you “We will try our best to get some results in a few days.”
This announcement is great but I suspect we’re not going to really see the full impact of this until months down the road, when the mighty YouTube transcribing golems have had time to do their work and captions become a lot more common. I’m looking forward to the transcriptions becoming available in other languages, so I can use the translate feature.
