viz.

Image Credit: Joseph Shelderfer 

During November and December I'll be devoting some blog posts to reviews of image archives recently added to the viz. "Images" resource page. First up is the gallery from the New York City Department of Records released in April 2012. The archive "provides free and open research access to over 800,000 items digitized from the Municipal Archives’ collections, including photographs, maps, motion-pictures and audio recordings." It is from the research perspective that I approach this review. Alan Taylor, at The Atlantic's photography blog In Focus, included some highlights he found while browsing the archive (warning: images include evidence photography from homicide crime scenes). Browsing through the images is certainly a good way to spend some time (perhaps too much time), but the archive is also organized through a series of collections that can help the viewer sift through the nearly one million images from the Big Apple.

Image Credit: Markley Boyer/Wildlife Conservation Society

H/T to The New Yorker

Next month, I’ll be making a long-awaited trip to New York City, my adopted hometown. To prepare, I’ve been studying Adam Platt’s latest restaurant reviews, reciting Walt Whitman’s “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” nightly like prayer, and spending quality time with landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta Project.

A digital map of the island as it appeared in 1609, when Hudson first sailed into New York Bay, this visualization tool offers an intriguing argument about the city’s ecological future.

Screen shot of New York Times

H/T: Becky

I recently spent a large chunk of time browsing through the collection of profiles in sound and images, "One in 8 Million" on the New York Times website.  I went there in search of examples of narrated slide shows for my students who are creating their own this month for our class on social documentary.  The series focuses on the "passions and problems, relationships and routines, vocations and obsessions" of New York City's "parade of people" it labels "characters" (Series Intro).  The series certainly does treat its individual subjects as quirky characters worthy of being paraded and I found myself endlessly trolling through profile after profile until it seemed the subjects were all the same in their uniqueness.  "One in 8 Million" allows viewers into the lives of the "Ex-Bank Robber" or the "Blind Wine Taster" and suggests that each is fascinating for its quirkiness but the ubiquity of that quirky quality acts as the great equalizer here.