New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive

The New York Times: 

NYPL Labs, started in 2011, has been known for experimental projects aimed at spurring users’ own tweaks and remixes. One scholar used its What’s on the Menu? project, which enlisted library users to transcribe its collection of 45,000 New York City restaurant menus, to create a new “data curation” of the collection. An engineer at Google has created a Google Cardboard application for its Stereogranimator, a program designed to mimic the proto-3-D effects of old-fashioned stereogram viewers.

Items from the digital collections have also found their way into projects like Urban Scratch-Off, a “map hack” that lets users scratch an aerial photograph of New York, lottery-ticket style, to reveal aerial shots of the city in 1924, and Mapping Cholera, which tracks an 1832 epidemic using geodata harvested from maps belonging to the library.

The new release will “reduce friction and make it even easier for people to get their hands on out-of-copyright material” owned by the library, Mr. Vershbow said.

Paola Antonelli: Rejection Is a Sign You’re Onto Something New

For more than 21 years, Paola Antonelli has been a curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Her career has been devoted to putting together provocative exhibits that spark new ways of thinking, and that often draws criticism. 

In this talk, Antonelli shares why failure and rejection are two feelings creative people should not only become familiar with, but should learn to embrace. “[Our work] can be weapons to really help people understand how to be better citizens,” she said. “But only if we will be allowed to do exhibitions that shock, disgust, and sometimes, even fail.”

The Hollywood Reporter's Director Oscar Roundtable

The year's most notable directors join for The Hollywood Reporter's Director Oscar Roundtable. The directors include Quentin Tarantino ('The Hateful Eight'), Tom Hooper ('The Danish Girl'), Alejandro G. Inarritu ('The Revenant'), Ridley Scott ('The Martian'), Danny Boyle ('Steve Jobs') and David O. Russell ('Joy').

Rochelle King: Your Biggest Rival is Your Best Asset

In our jobs, family life, and social circles, conflict is difficult to manage. In this 99U Talk, Spotify's Global VP of Design Director Rochelle King reminds us that tension is essential in any creative endeavor. Instead of running from confrontation King says, "the biggest thing that I've learned about dealing with conflict is that it's fundamentally about the mindset. Explicitly embracing conflict actually allowed me to take control of it."

The birth of the web

CERN takes a look at the beginning of the web and how it flourished because the original software was made public domain: 

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

The first website at CERN - and in the world - was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server. The NeXT machine - the original web server - is still at CERN. As part of the project to restore the first website, in 2013 CERN reinstated the world's first website to its original address.

On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. CERN made the next release available with an open licence, as a more sure way to maximise its dissemination. Through these actions, making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.

The very first web site.