Photographer Thomas E. Askew took this photo of six musicians with their instruments in his home studio on Summit Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia. The Library of Congress has identified the sitters from left: the photographer’s twin sons Clarence and Norman Askew, son Arthur Askew, neighbor Jake Sansome, and sons Robert and Walter Askew.

This image is part of a Library of Congress Collection, African American Photographs Assembled for the 1900 Paris Exhibition, now fully searchable in NINES. Many of these images were gathered into volumes by W.E.B. Du Bois depicting “Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A.,” providing a glimpse into the homes, the churches and daily lives of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.

Click here to browse this set in NINES, and remember: the NINES Exhibit Builder is available for use in the classroom as well as for original scholarship. Here’s a handy guide to using our authoring tool!

Now that a beta version of 18thConnect is online, adding another 400,000 objects to the NINES search index, I’d like to urge people to experiment with using our site in the classroom. Even if students are just browsing the tag cloud or perusing other groups’ content, there’s a high probability that they’ll encounter material they’ve never seen before, or wouldn’t otherwise gain access to because of subscription paywalls.

Keep in mind that we’re always appreciative of feedback, so be sure to contact us at inquiries [at] nines dot org if you have any questions or feature requests!

This daguerreotype of Portsmouth Square in San Francisco was taken sometime in the early 1850s, most certainly before June 22, 1851. The characteristic hills of San Francisco are remarkably bare and open in contrast to the city today. Here’s a recent 360 degree panorama of the square for comparison.

More daguerreotypes like this one can be found in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs collection, now searchable in NINES.

If you are a Firefox user and you’ve installed Zotero as a plug-in, a little folder icon will appear in the URL bar of your browser whenever you are on a page with collect-able objects. Simply click the folder and choose which objects you’d like to save to your Zotero library. In the not-too-distant future, we plan to allow you to sync your NINES objects with your Zotero objects, making Exhibit Building with external links much simpler.

To browse objects from The Old Bailey Online in the new 18thConnect interface, click on on this saved search.

[cross-posted at 18thConnect.org]

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-commitment-to-digital-humanities.html

We are thrilled to have received this competitive award, and look forward to working to optimize Juxta for the web.

Here is an abstract of our application for the Google Award:

With the support of a Google Digital Humanities Research Award, we propose to transform Juxta into a web-based application integrated with Google Books. Scholars could use such a tool to track changes in language over time and to test literary and historical theories through comparative analysis of texts.

As the largest single part of the general remediation of the global library to digital formats, the 12,000,000+ books digitized by Google represent a major opportunity for scholars interested in the history of texts and editions. We want to know how Charles Dickens and Henry James changed their novels as they went through different editions in their lifetimes; and we also want to see the changes introduced by later editors, in later printings.  We want to collate versions of poems published by Sylvia Plath and Walt Whitman to discover their revisions.  We want to compare digital texts of uncertain origin with known versions, as a mode of authentication.

[Read the whole article over at the Juxta blog.]

It’s the last day of classes at the DHO/NINES Summer Workshop, and things are beginning to wind down. I assisted Laura Mandell in leading the XSLT class, in which we threw out a dizzying amount of material and hoped to help some projects get their XML transformations in order.

Teaching an XSLT class was a new experience for me. I’m very comfortable in front of the art history classroom, armed with my slides and my various teaching points. XSLT required a completely different set of skills, not least of them the ability to troubleshoot the various approaches each student took to transform the same material. Instead of lecturing about the proper way to do things, Laura and I devoted most of our time to teaching the students how to identify where the process had gone wrong. We won’t be able to sit with them and guide them through future project-specific stylesheets, but we can demonstrate our own tried and true methods for pinpointing issues. In the end, the students walked away with a set of templates to adapt to their own work, and, hopefully, a better way to manipulate their XML.

Many of us have learned XSLT in spurts, solving the problems as they arose. I’m heartened to be a part of a workshop that gives digital humanists a better overview of their tools, and saves them a lot of solitary frustration. They’ll still need a manual, but perhaps it will be slightly more comprehensible when they do!

Thanks to all those who contributed their time and feedback in the conception of this grant application. More updates about the schedule of these workshops will be posted in the near future.

This news comes at a great time for NINES, as we’re about to kick off our 2010 Summer Workshop in collaboration with the DHO.