Apparently it’s visual image day here at ResearchBuzz. There’s a new database of 6,000 photographs — 3,500 by Jack Richard and 2,500 by Charles Belden — showing northwestern Wyoming over a span of 100 years.
The photographs are in two collections — one for Richard and one for Belden — at http://www.bbhc.org/hmrl/collection.cfm . (This is the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, by the way.) I took a look at the Jack Richard Collection.
You can do a browse of everything in the collection, or you can do a keyword search (the keyword search, by default, spans both collections.) I did a search for cowboy and got over 300 results. All the results were in black and white and included Native Americans in parades with cowboys, calves getting branded, bucking broncos, and an adorable picture of a cowboy feeding an antelope.
Results are presented in a table with thumbnails. Click on the thumbnails for a larger image and more details, including date (I saw a lot that were just “circa 1930s”), notes, subject matter, and the location. There’s also a link to where you can order reprints of that image.
I didn’t see a way to browse by date, but you can do a search within a certain date range without including keywords. Meaning, of course, that you get all the pictures for that date. I did a search for 1901-1910 and got 80 pictures, with images from other photographers besides Belden and Richard. (Jack Richard, age 4, is even in one of these very old pictures.)
All the pictures I saw except one were black and white (the one was a grizzly bear pelt from the 1950s) and most of what I saw was from the 30s. I don’t hear often about digital collections from Wyoming, so I wanted to spotlight this one here. Try the subject listings for each picture to go browsing off in lots of different directions.
The ability to geotag photos has been available for a while now — well over a year. This new offering allows users to browse photos by place. According to the announcement over 30 million photos have been tagged! Flickr Places starts at http://flickr.com/places/ . You can explore some maps that are provided by Flickr or you can do a search. Searching for Hollywood, for example, gave me several options including Hollywood California and Hollywood Florida. I looked at Hollywood California and got, pictures of Hollywood… Maryland? Not quite what I was looking for. When I searched directly for Hollywood California, I still got Maryland photos.
I tried again, this time for Benin. This time it worked! I got a map of Benin, suggestions for other places, and an assortment of photographs. (You can list them by their interesting factor, or by the date they were added.) There were featured photographers related to Benin, groups related to Benin, and a search box that will search just those photographs that are geotagged for Benin. There are also popular tags related to photographs taken in Benin.
To get to the photo pages, click on the photos themselves. What a great way to explore. I would come here first if I was planning to go somewhere and wanted to get a sense of what that place was like.
Personally I’m not into getting up at zero AM and staggering to the mall. I’d rather stay home and shop online. I don’t have to worry about a place to park, and I don’t have to worry about someone smacking me in the head with a shopping bag.
Amazon is aiming for people like me with its online Black Friday deals. You can get a list of the today’s shopping deals — one every hour — at the hourly lightning deals page.
Amazon is also doing its Amazon votes promotion, which allows customers to vote on items they want to see heavily discounted. (The product with the most votes gets the deep discount.)
And finally, as this is a Web 2.0 Black Friday, Amazon has a widget for today’s deals. Check it out, and happy shopping!
