ResearchBuzz

The University of Miami has an archive of digital images and a timeline called “Travel, Tourism and Urban Growth in Greater Miami” available at http://scholar.library.miami.edu/miamidigital/ . True to south Florida, the front page is in pink and a tealish blue.

There’s an introduction to the overall project, but what I found fascinating was the timeline, which starts in 1819 which Spain ceded Florida to the United States. a variety of events are described on the timeline, and some have external pictures and other information added to them (maps, an article on the Seminole Indians, pictures of William Brickell, etc.) The timeline is divided into four sections and goes from 1819 to the 1990s.

The image gallery is viewable in several different ways. You can search by keyword, browse by topic type, browse by collection or location, or browse by resource type (including aerial views, maps, night photographs, or postcards.)

I did a keyword search for “beach” and got 38 pages of results — pages seem to have nine images each. Thumbnails are good-sized; all the results on the first page were postcards. The postcards looked like they ranged in date from around the turn of the century on up. Later in the search results I found letters, promotional materials, and newspaper images. Detail pages for each of the items provides subject, date (when available; many of the postcards I looked at did not have dates), repository, and collection. The images themselves are made available in a Flash viewer for easy zooming and panning.

The Smithsonian Institution has announced a new Web site — Earth From Space — that provides information about and examples of satellite imagery. This is a little out of my sphere but since Google Maps and other imagery-using maps are so popular, I thought I’d cover it here. You can visit at http://www.earthfromspace.si.edu/ .

Among the offerings here is an online exhibit that offers images in several different categories, including “Water and Air” “Structure of the Land”, and “Human Presence”. You can zoom in considerably on each of the views provided, but be sure to wait for the picture to reload after you zoom (or else you’ll be staring at pixels.)

In addition to the limited imagery, there’s also a page of lesson plans on the site. (And if you like the lessons page, visit the resources page, which points to several external resources.)

Apparently this site was developed to support a tour of Earth from Space, a collaboration between SITES and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The tour schedule is nowhere near filled (the tour will be running through 2010!) but you can see what’s been booked so far at http://www.sites.si.edu/exhibitions/exhibits/earth/main.htm#itinerary.

Google has announced a new interface and features for Google Groups, the Google property that started as Usenet posts but has expanded to discussion and mailing lists that anybody can create. You can check out the new version of groups at http://groups-beta.google.com/.

At first glance it looks more to me like Yahoo Groups than it used to, which is funny; except for the fact that Yahoo Groups is much older and therefore hosts a lot more groups, I find Google Groups to have better searching and usability features (message searching across all groups at once, better group search with fewer spam results, etc.)

An overview of the new features: group creators and administrators now have a lot more control over how the new group looks. Once a group has been created, the group owner has the option to create a welcome message and upload a logo for the group. There’s also a “pages” section that allows users to create HTML pages from within the group environment. Members of a group can also upload files in a new “files” section and create member profiles. You can get an overview of all the new features in the Google Groups Beta Tour.

I went and looked at the Google Maps API group using the new beta — you can see it at http://groups-beta.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API . People had put code problems into the “pages” section, but were being asked to move them into the regular messages section. A .gif and what looked like some code were all that were in the “files” section. This new setup may take a little getting used to, but I can see where it would be very useful for community organization.