Congratulations to the Street Vendor Project on 10 years of amazing work organizing and advocating on behalf of New York City street vendors (and for the Vendy Awards as well)!
Photos taken at the “Street Vendor Project Turns 10″ celebration at Judson Memorial Church in New York City on March 27, 2012.
This is a pretty amazing online project presenting the work of Mark Twain. Not just the text of his letters, articles, and books, but scholarly annotation. It’s a work-in-progress, not just because the scholarly work continues, but because Mark Twain was extremely prolific and there is a huge amount of work to post. According to the site, in addition to the many books, pamphlets, speeches, and articles he wrote, Twain is believed to have written over 50,000 letters in his lifetime.
The goal of the site is to “produce a digital critical edition, fully annotated, of everything Mark Twain wrote.” It’s clear how much work has gone into the project, and the attention to detail is impressive.
This is a great example of using the web to document, organize and showcase a rich archive of a writer’s body of work. I think it also shows the limitation of something like Google Books — which of course has amazing potential and is certainly useful from a search perspective but currently lacks scholarly annotation or even basic descriptions and historical/literary context, not to mention its documented metadata problem.
With the Mark Twain Project, though, one huge improvement would be for the site to allow users to export the texts into formats that could easily be imported to the reader of their choice. There are other types of solutions (HTML5, “Books in Browsers“) coming which would make an option like that unnecessary, but as the site is currently built, an export function would be a nice addition to an already feature rich site.
Smith Magazine has a new project (and forthcoming book) — The Moment: “Stories of how a single moment changed your life in a profound way.” Submit your “moment” at the site or on the Facebook page.
Full details and links at ImprovEverywhere.com.
Check out the WhipUp 2009 Calendar, which features artwork from 13 artists whose work has appeared on the excellent, inspiring, always crafty whipup.net website. Something definitely worth adding to your holiday gift/wish list.
Here are the artists featured in the calendar:
Cover: Sandra Monat.
January: Jodie Carlton.
February: Abby Glassenberg.
March: Alice Merlino.
April: Mimi Kirchner.
May: Helle Jorgensen.
June: Neta Amir.
July: Aprill Newman.
August: Kimberly Scola.
September: Emily Moss.
October: Shula Hampson.
November: Pimp Stitch.
December: Jared Flood.
A fun, timely, and affordable gift idea. See it at icantaffordtoloveny.com. (Found via Thrillist.com.)
Very cool project: Listography.com — a website that allows you to create an online showcase space for your lists, whatever those lists might be — wishlists, favorite movie lists, to-do lists, and more. The project was created by Lisa Nola and Adam. You can read more about the project here. I like the way Lisa described it to me in an email: Listorgraphy is “basically capturing life in lists (every list you can imagine I suppose).”
There are also these wonderful companion Listography books, written by Lisa Nola and illustrated by Nathaniel Russell. These are certainly appropriate items to place on your holiday gift/wish lists.
I have to say, like a lot of people out there, I love lists. From found lists to grocery lists to life lists, to GTD lists to Not-To-Do lists. I’m all over the place with them — I go from trying (and quickly failing) to get with the whole Getting Things Done system to writing whatever pops into my head lists (countries I’ve visited and the beers I drank in them; rainstorm memories; movies that are ideal to watch on airplanes; best music to listen to while running) on scraps of paper. These lists are usually misplaced fairly quickly, and I don’t stumble upon them again until I finally get around to the to-do list item of cleaning up all the stacks of paper that are piled up all around me. I need to make a list of my lists, and then add an item on my to-do list to post some of them at listography.com.