More goodness from Philipp over at Blogoscoped! I covered his Vintage Ads site a while ago but now I’ve found out about CoverBrowser at http://www.coverbrowser.com, which has both a huge collection of comic book covers (over 450,000+), more resources, and fun tools for playing with them.
If you looked at the Vintage Ad Browser this is going to look similar. The front page has a list of comic book titles through which you can browse, from “Archie Annual Digest” to “Zap Comix.” Some of the titles expand to show title sets (Archie, Flash, Hulk, Valian, etc.) Clicking on a title takes you to a page (sometimes several pages) full of covers. Mostly all the information available is just title and issue number, though sometimes there’s a link to buy the item on eBay.
You can also do a keyword search. I did a search for final and got over 400 results. While there were lots of comic book covers here, I also found video game covers, CD covers, and a couple of weird DVD covers.
If you just want to get a sense of what’s available here, you can check out the covers by picking them at random. There’s also a labs feature, at http://www.coverbrowser.com/labs. There are several features here. You can browse comics by color. You can play the tagging game, where you see if the tags you suggest for a cover match tags other people have suggested (a fun game and a good way of tagging all the available covers.) You can also fill the speech/thought bubble on a comic cover with your own words and then download the image using the speech bubbler.
(If you don’t like the cover you see, reload the page and you’ll get a new one.)
Philipp must have a lot of energy to keep putting together these great resources. A heck of a browse!
Okay, this wins my award as “most specialized search engine” so far this year. SlideFinder, at http://www.slidefinder.net/, helps you find PowerPoint presentations on the Web.
You can do a simple keyword search or try out the advanced search that allows you to search by both presentation detail or by slide (cool!). I did a simple keyword search for social media.
Yow! I got 1000 results. Search results are presented in a grid with a thumbnail of a presentation slide, a link for download, and the domain from which the presentation comes. Click on the thumbnail and you’ll get the all the slides of the presentation (sometimes spread over multiple pages). Hold your mouse over a slide for a larger version in a popup window. On the right nav of a presentation’s page are links to embed it as well as links to similar presentations (though those are not always available.)
This is mostly a search engine, but you can also browse presentations available at universities via http://www.slidefinder.net/University. The front page also allows you to browse the presentations by language, sort of. According to the site, there are 23,596 presentations available in Spanish and 621 available in Hindi. It LOOKS like the search engine is just finding presentations based on the country code of the presentation’s URL; most of the “Hindi” presentations I saw were actually in English.
This is a terrific idea, well executed! I love the advanced search options and the wide variety of results I got. Two additional features would make it almost perfect: RSS feeds for results (aw, c’mon Slideshare!) and more date information for the presentations (some
of this material will not get old, but a lot of it — especially the Internet stuff — will.) I thought that most people doing slide presentations put dates on the front or ending pages, but apparently I was wrong…
Now, that’s specific, isn’t it? A database of female artists from Illinois who were active between 1840 and 1940. And yet it ends up being a pretty big database. This Illinois Women Artists Project is now available at http://iwa.bradley.edu and at this writing it has over 450 artists!
From the front page of the site you can learn more about the project and do a little browsing, but I liked the artists page better. Here you can search by keyword, or explore the artists by medium, from architectural design to relief sculpture.
I chose lithography and got a plain list of ten names. But when I picked Hazel Ewell I got a variety of biographic information including spouse name, birth and death dates, mediums, exhibitions, people with whom she worked, and other occupations.
The names I looked at did not have images associated with them, though some of the artists do. If you want to see some representative paintings, head over the online exhibit, which has several dozen artworks.
In addition to the paintings and the biographical information for artists, the site also has multimedia (several biographical videos with a podcast “coming soon”) as well as some essays, a substantial link list, and a timeline.
