I’m excited to have contributed a post to HiLobrow’s Kern Your Enthusiasm series, which has a lot of smart, interesting people writing about a favorite (or not-favorite) font. For my bit, I wrote about the typefaces that Edward Johnston designed for the Cranach Press Hamlet, published in 1928. My opening gives you my take on the font:
Tag: know your history
it’s history, not a viral feed
For months now I’ve been stewing about how much I hate @HistoryInPics and their ilk (@HistoryInPix, @HistoricalPics, @History_Pics, etc.)—twitter streams that do nothing more than post “old” pictures and little tidbits of captions for them. ((I despise them so much I’m not going to link to them or list them all. You’re clever. You can figure it out.)) And when I say “nothing more” that’s precisely what I mean. What they don’t post includes attribution to the photographer or to the institution hosting the digital image. There’s no way to easily learn more about the image (you can, of course, do an image search through TinEye or Google Image Search and try to track it down that way). Alexis Madrigal recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic revealing that @HistoryInPics is run by a couple of teenagers who are savvy at generating viral social media accounts to bring in money:
early modern women printers: an Ada Lovelace post
Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace is often referred to as the first computer programmer, based on her 1842 treatise on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine; Ada Lovelace Day began in 2009 as a way of increasing the profile of women in Science, Engineering, Technology, and Math (commonly referred to as STEM fields). I’m not in a STEM field (though I’m the almuna of a college that prides itself on turning out huge numbers of women who are). But you know who we could see as being early STEM pioneers? Printers. Early modern printers were using a new technology that had a radical impact on their world. ((Please don’t send me comments about how the printing press didn’t cause any revolutions. No one thing changes the world in isolation. But moveable type was fucking huge.)) And you know who we find in printing in early modern London? Women. Here’s a…