The Black Music History Library

This digital library was born out of a need to make resources about Black music history as comprehensive and accessible as possible. It contains well over one thousand entries (and counting) in the form of books, articles, documentaries, series, radio segments, and podcasts about the Black origins of popular and traditional music, dating from the 18th century to the present day. These materials range from informal to scholarly, meaning there is something in the library for everyone.

There are many notable archives doing similar work, yet it isn’t uncommon for some to have a limited view of Black music—one which fuels US-centrism and a preference for vernacular music traditions. This collection considers the term “Black music” more widely, as it aims to address any instances in which Black participation led to the creation or innovation of music across the diaspora. Plainly speaking, that means just about every genre will be included here.

Black artists have often been minimized or omitted entirely when it comes to the discussion, practice, and research of many forms of music. This library seeks to correct that. It is time to reframe Black music history as foundational to American music history, Latinx music history, and popular music history at large.

via Kottke.org.

(Content warning: rape)

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument - Caroline Randall Williams

Noto is a collaboration between Monotype and Google to create a typeface covering over 100 writing systems and more than 800 languages.

The brief, "No more tofu", tofu being the nickname for the blank boxes that you see when a computer lacks support for a particular character. So that's a thing I learned today.

There are some characters you can only see on stones. If you don’t move them to the web, over time those stones will become sand and we’ll never be able to recover those drawings or that writing.

I love this kind of project, that touches on communication, history, society, and preserving the past.

Nine people came together at CERN for five days and made something amazing. I still can’t quite believe it.

This is a wonderful project in celebration of the Web's 30th birthday, recreating the first ever browser, WorldWideWeb, which ran on NeXT machines.

My first job in technology, working on the computer support desk at Coventry University (back in 1995… eek!), involved looking after a number of NeXT machines. So even outside of the Web angle, this project is full of all sorts of nostalgia and memories for me. And how incredible is it that they've built the browser inside a browser!

I'm extremely pleased about how this site renders in WorldWideWeb, a testemant to the resilience of plain old semantic HTML

If you want to have a play with any of your own sites, getting started is a little different to these days:

1. Launch the WorldWideWeb browser.
2. Select "Document" from the menu on the side.
3. Select "Open from full document reference".
4. Type a URL into the "reference" field.
5. Click "Open".

And remember, you need to double click on links to activate them.

A fascinating and poignant Twitter thread from Marcin Wichary, about user interfaces that accidentally collect memories, and tell a story about the past.

Fascinated by UIs that accidentally amass memories. One of them is the wi-fi “preferred networks” pane – unexpected reminders of business trips, vacations, accidental detours, once frequented and now closed cafés. pic.twitter.com/r137dZI0r8

— Marcin Wichary (@mwichary) 14 May 2018

I wonder what I would see if I fired up any of the old social apps I don't use any more, like Adium, or Textual.

Via this ongoing Metafilter post with more funny and sad stories of accidental memories.

The web is like the ship of Theseus—so much of it has been changed and added to over time. That doesn’t mean its initial design was flawed—just the opposite. It means that its initial design wasn’t unnecessarily rigid. The simplicity of the early web wasn’t a bug, it was a feature.

Jeremy Keith on the origins of the web and the false idea that it was designed solely for sharing documents.

This report on an IRIX OS release from 1993 shows that the more things change, the more things stay the same.

It's full of great advice such as:

Aim for simplicity in design, not complexity. Make a few things work really well; don't have 1000 flaky programs. Be willing to cut features; who's going to be more pissed off: a customer who was promised a feature that doesn't appear, or the same customer who gets the promised feature, and after months of struggling with it, discovers he can't make it work?

And a few brilliant burns:

Marketing - Engineering Disconnect: "Marketing -- where the rubber meets the sky."

(via O'Reilly Ideas' 4 Short Links)

Around 5 years ago I had to put my belongings in storage due to a pending move.

5 years later I finally got them back, and while unpacking my cameras I realised that the Coronet 6-6 still had a film in it.

Yesterday I got the film back from the developers.

As best as I can remember (comparing them to existing digital shots from the time, plus when I received the camera), they were taken in Cornbury Park, during the winter of 2010, while I was working at Torchbox.

This camera was a present from Auntie Marie, who is now sadly gone. So although the memories are bitter sweet, it's a nice reminder of the power of photography.

Today, on the 13th May 2015, I stood at the top of Elizabeth Tower, next to Big Ben as it struck 3pm.

Sometimes our memory can be fuzzy about where we were, or what we were doing, at a particular moment in history, but I will always know exactly where I was at 3pm on the 13th May 2015.

That's a moment in time that hadn't happened before, and won't happen again, and it's mine.

Two Way Street is a fantastic example of what you can do with good metadata around objects. Built by the team at Good, Form & Spectacle it allows you to explore the British Museum collection by multiple facets, including acquisition date, acquisition source, type, material, techniques, and many more.