ResearchBuzz

Nobody sent me any information on this one; I was just poking around Wikipedia to see if it had an entry on Robert Conley. It does, but it’s very brief. There’s a much more extensive biography at NativeWiki, available at http://www.nativewiki.org/ .

NativeWiki describes itself as “a free, open-to-the-public library of information about indigenous nations and peoples (past and present) of the world.” Though it’s much smaller than Wikipedia (something over 1100 pages) in some respects it’s much more detailed. Not only Robert Conley, but there’s an extensive section on Native American authors, from Abenaki authors to Pueblo authors. Sometimes the entries seem very similar to Wikipedia (Simon Ortiz) while sometimes there’s a NativeWiki entry where there’s no Wikipedia entry at all (Edgar Gabriel Silex).

In addition to the author information there are several sections for the wiki, including nations and peoples, documents and materials (looks more like an outline of topics that hasn’t been filled in yet), geographic regions, and a picture gallery. There are also pointers to other Native American resource sites NativeWeb and NativeTech.

Thanks to reader L for sending me a note about the Carlyle Letters Online, a collection of 19th century letters from Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. There are over 10,000 letters here! You can check them out at http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/ .

You can browse by date, recipient, or subject. Because I don’t know too much about this collection I chose to browse by subject. There’s a (very abridged) list of subjects on the subject page, but look at the top of the page to browse the topic list alphabetically, from “A. B.” (J. S. Mill) to “Zwei fliegen”. Click on a subject on the left and the list of relevant letters appears instantly on the right. Very cool.

One of the subjects was “Advice to Aspiring Writer” so I chose that. It was one letter, written in June 1849 by Thomas Carlyle to an unidentified correspondent. The text of the letter is included, but not the original image. (One great quote about being an author: “In no province of human industry is there hungrier competition, and more dark stolidity awarding the decision, than in that same.”)

To the right of the letter is additional linkage that will let you save the letter to a “My Carlyle” file, get citation information, or purchase a printed volume of the letters. There is also an option to see “similar letters” but that didn’t work well for me. For the letter I mentioned above I got 505 similar letters, all marked “Unknown Correspondent.” Since the search results for the letters don’t give any idea of subject, I had no idea of what I was looking at — and no desire to wade through 505 letters.

You can get information about Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle at this part of the Web site.

Okay, so it’s not “Hix Nix Stix Pix”. I tried. Anyway, there’s a new digital archive available for Jay Norwood (”Ding”) Darling and his editorial cartoons — over 10,000 of them, and some audio recordings as well. They’re available at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/ding/.

Ding Darling was not only an editorial cartoonist for almost 50 years, but was also once head of what is now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, so what’s here is all over the map. (By the way, if you have a minute, read this site’s history. How the archivists dealt with the audio is great reading.)

The audio is off in its own section. You can listen to four clips of Darling’s dictation of correspondence.

Now the cartoons are both searchable and browsable. You can search by keyword, or you can browse by subject — topic, people, events, and depictions. You can also browse ALL the cartoons, but since there are over 10,000 of ‘em, I’d skip that. I did a search for prohibition and got 422 results. Search results include a thumbnail, title of the cartoon, original date of issue (often a full date but sometimes only a month and year) and topic.

Click on the cartoon and you’ll get a much larger cartoon (but sometimes not large enough; Darling’s drawings are very detailed) with additional information including people mentioned (hyperlinked to lists of other cartoons), rights information, and the complete text of the cartoons, which is useful when you have cartoons like “Interviews that Never Happened”. The cartoons are not, unfortunately, large enough that the text is easy to read.

Some of these cartoons are very local, which left me completely lost, while some of them are interesting cultural lessons (search for fashion.) A fun browse.