ResearchBuzz

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.

More ways for you to add topical stuff to your site. Google recently announced the Google NewsBar, which allows you to add some AJAXy goodness to your site.

You have two ways you can add it to your site. The first way is a wizard, which walks you through some basic questions (basically you decide horizontal or vertical and add some search terms) and then pops out some code. Here’s an example of Google News search for Yahoo:

(Hmm… I don’t think it’s working…)

If you’re interested in getting a little more into it than a wizard, check out the developer’s guide. (I think it’s interesting that you have to get an AJAX API key for some functionality.)

I’m going to experiment and see about using category words in as search terms, assuming I can get it to work to start with…

Actually it’s not just a search engine for UK media but a nicely-put-together set of tools. Kudos to Martin Belam, who created Chipwrapper, available in beta at http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/ .

So what kind of tools? Chipwrapper starts with a Google Custom Search that searches a variety of newspapers and news sources in the UK, including BBS, The Scotsman, The Telegraph, and The Times. I liked the quality of the results, but unfortunately as the results are for WEB and not NEWS, you can’t list them by date and you don’t get date of creation for the articles. (I would love to see a Google Custom News search.) On the upside you’ll probably getting more archive results here.

You don’t have to search to get news immediately, though. There’s a headline aggregator on the front page that shows current top headlines from several different sources. For an even more delineated look at the top stories, check out the Headline Buzz, which is seven of the most popular words in the UK’s headlines within the past hour. (click on those words and a Chipwrapper search will run for that word.) There’s a tag cloud also available for http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/buzz/ .

There are several RSS feeds available for Chipwrapper (you can get a list at http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/tools/rss_feeds.shtml .) There are also a couple of plugins and a toolbar button. Lots of tools here, all built around UK media search. Nicely done.