The Eastman House and the International Center of Photography are working to put together "one of the largest freely accessible databases of masterwork photography anywhere on the Web." It's called Photomuse, and when it's done it looks like it will be a highly usable reference work.
The creators say the goal is to organize the site so that works can be found not only by the name of the photographer but also in many other ways. For example, a Hine picture of an Italian immigrant couple could be found under the headings of "immigration," or "Italian-Americans" or "Ellis Island" or "urban photography" or under the headings of exhibitions where the photograph has been shown through the years.
There's a whole compendium of languages, and I've never heard of it? I'm no linguistics professor, just a guy with an interest in the field, but Ethnologue is entirely new to me. Apparently its origin dates back to 1951:
The project was founded by Richard Pittman, a missionary who thought other missionaries needed better information about which languages lacked a Bible. The first version appeared in 1951, 10 mimeographed pages that described 40 languages.
An interesting tidbit, representative of what you'll find there: "The number of languages listed for USA is 238. Of those, 162 are living languages, 3 are second language without mother-tongue speakers, and 73 are extinct."
Just a couple of things to browse through in your spare time.
Posted by Linkmeister at July 21, 2005 12:01 AM | TrackBack