Archives
AdFlip Print advertising archive, searchable by year or keyword. DTS.
American Life Histories Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-40. Great archive of WPA oral histories searchable by region. DTS.
George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress) "The George Grantham Bain Collection represents the photographic files of one of America's earliest news picture agencies. The collection richly documents sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters, political activities including the woman suffrage campaign, conventions and public celebrations. The photographs Bain produced and gathered for distribution through his news service were worldwide in their coverage, but there was a special emphasis on life in New York City. The bulk of the collection dates from the 1900s to the mid-1920s, but scattered images can be found as early as the 1860s and as late as the 1930s."
Internet Archive Amazing collection of resources includes archives of websites, moving images, texts, audio, software, education. Download a 1950s sex education film or 1920s silent instructional film on how to use the telephone -- many in high-resolution editable formats. "The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an ‘Internet library,’ with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections." DTS.
Limesroad Very cool a free online database for old photographs, mostly in black and white and sepia. There is a wide range of photos, such as animals, military, formal portraits, landscape, postcards, ads, etc. Most of the photos have been obtained from second-hand book shops, markets, jumble/rummage sales. DTS.
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
UCSB Edison Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project Downloads and streaming radio.
WebArchivist.org Projects (SUNY/UW) Asian Tsunami, 2002 Elections, September 11 attacks, student projects, Internet and elections archive.
Well Connected Media ownership by area.
Communities
Academici Social networking for academics
H20 (Harvard) The H2O project is building an interlocking collection of communities based on the free creation and exchange of ideas. The H2O system consists of two components -- the Idea Exchange (online courses under Creative COmmons) and the Rotisserie (discussion support for classes). DTS.
Ideonaut Social networking for ideas
Barnraiser Social networking for social entrepreneurs.
Tribe Multipurpose social networking, including academic/theory groups.
Creative Commons Get Content Search for Creative Commons audio, images, text, video, and other formats that are free to share online.
Directory of Open Access Journals Free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, aiming to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 2009 journals in the directory. Currently 500 journals are searchable at article level. As of Jan. 24, 2006, 84532 articles were included in the DOAJ service.
Eldis database 15,680 online documents | 4,500 organizations | 15,000 email messages Eldis is one of a family of knowledge services from IDS) Resources on topics ranging from Ageing populations to, Corporate social responsibility to, Influencing policy and World Bank & IMF. JC.
Edge A website that is devoted to pondering and reporting on the speculations of leading thinkers and scientists. Each year they send out a "big, open-ended question" and publish selected replies. Last year's question was "What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?" It's a good site because it welcomes contributions from both humanists and hard scientists, as well as everyone in between. Reading through it, one can get a sense of the rhetorical direction of those who are supposedly on the cutting edge. Identify the spaces between what is going on in science and what is being said about science. DM.
Follow the Money Searchable database of political donations, also organized by campaigns and topics (e.g., 2004 Marriage Amendments).
GLS Free Trademark Search Search by names and words.
The Media History Project Connections Pages Includes sections on oral culture, print, telegraphy, telephony, journalism, photography, comics and graphics, advertising, radio, recording industry, movies, television, computing, reference and more. DTS.
OpenSecrets.org Campaign contributions lookup: Find individual and soft money contributors.
Proquest Information and Learning (by subscription only) Historical Databases These allow you to not only look up full-text articles, but PDFs of that article as it originally appeared in the paper and a PDF of the page it appeared on. this is an invaluable leap forward in online news research as it allows you to analyze photographs, article placement, juxtaposition with other stories, nearby ads, and the overall tenor of the historical moment. It adds the essential dimension of context to content research. Includes: The New York Times 1851-2002, The Los Angeles Times 1881-1985 and The Wall Street Journal 1889-1988. DTS
Ebsco host (by subscription only) A terrific meta-scholarly search engine, better than just about any other I can think of. DW.
They Rule "They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations. "
U.S. Patent Office Trademark Design Search Search by visual icon or graphic.
Lists
Nettime Nettime is a very long-standing email list (it's been around since 1995) that is a heady mix of critical theory, science and technology studies, tech activism, cultural studies, new media art, event-scenes and propaganda critique, and so on. It has subscribers from all over the world, probably a majority from the EU, and a mix of academics, activists, artists, tech geeks, and every combination thereof. The readers are print compilations of 'collaboratively filtered texts,' or keywords and extracts from mostly essay-length postings to the list during the course of the past decade. These texts are frequently among the most innovative and interesting in terms of 'speculative theory' in the field of communication, new media, and globalization. I highly recommend anyone interested in 'new media,' internet, mobile telephony, art, activism, globalization, representation, culture, critique, technology, etc. to subscribe to the list and read the readers. SCC.
Misc.
CineQueer GLAAD guide to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender images in film.
The Content Analysis Guidebook Online Resources
Visual Communication Concept Explorer
Writing Sample Analyzer Calculates the number of sentences, words, and characters in a writing sample, estimating how many syllables are present in each word. Using these numbers, it then calculates the Flesch Reading Ease, Fog Scale Level, and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, which are three of the most common readability algorithms. Simply supply a sample of your writing up to 5,000 characters and then click "Analyze." DTS.
Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections
Babel Fish Translation.
Catchword Linguistics Glossary
Info Please Compendium of multiple reference sites. One great example is a month-by-month historical almanac from Time magazine, a quick way to get historical context for rhetorical or cultural analyses. Navigate to Almanac, enter a year as your search term, then look for [YEAR] Month-by-Month in search results. DTS.
Online Slang Dictionary (Berkeley)
RhymeZone Rhyming dictionary and thesaurus.
SlangSite Slang dictionary.
Symbols.com Search by graphic or word index.
U. K. Slang and Colloquialisms
Visual Thesaurus A
useful resource if you have ever been stuck for words. It has an interesting
format, which allows you to looks at words embedded in a web of other words.
JC. Interactive, dynamic, and very groovy online depiction of words, ideas,
and concepts as they interrelate. Try plugging in 'communicate.' DTS.
Search
Scroogle "Scraping and ad-stripping Google's results. If done in the public interest and not for profit, it's legal. What's more, Google can't block you if they can't find you."
Alexa Web search and traffic rankings.
Podscope Audio / video
Software
Inspiration If you haven't ever tried this brainstorming / concept-mapping software, I highly recommend it for early stages of complex projects (like dissertations maybe). The company recently re-branded this as educational software, so ignore all the "kids stuff" design on the website; it's much more than that. DTS.
VisualMind Similar to Inspiration, but targeted to grownups. DTS.