the state I'm living in

"More than 80,000 of Albert Einstein’s papers, including his most famous formula — E=mc² — and letters to and from his former mistresses, are going online at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro says on All Things Considered, “what the trove uncovers is a picture of complex man who was concerned about the human condition” as well as the mysteries of science."

"The Guggenheim is one of the real standouts in the global modern art arena. The New York-based institution is no light-weight in the area of arts education. They’ve now extended that mission extensively by making dozens of high-quality publications on artists available to anyone with an Internet connection. The books, art catalogues for major exhibitions at the museum, pop out into a clean, fast virtual book reader. Open Culture points out that the books are also available for download in a number of e-book formats, including ePub and PDF, at Archive.org’s Guggenheim page."

"Life itself is the biggest of all big data. The amount of information contained within one leaf is staggering, but the information contained within 6.3 million plant specimens staggers. Currently, those samples are contained in two buildings of the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG) in St. Louis. But soon, they will all be online. Did I say soon? I meant eventually. A team at the Garden, one of the largest repositories of botanical information in the world, is photographing and uploading the samples one leaf, seed, pod and stalk at a time. So far, after reviewing just under 4 million, they have uploaded 160,000 images."

"A digital interface needs to be familiar enough to be intuitive, while simultaneously taking advantage of the lack of constraints in a virtual space."

"Users are generating that reality every day at The New York Public Library through two landmark crowdsourcing endeavors, What’s on the Menu? and Map Rectifier. The former enlists the public in the transcription of historical menus, and the latter allows users to “rectify” historical maps by overlaying them on modern ones. Both projects stand out amid a glut of competitors as refreshingly guilt-free and subliminally educational uses of online time. With every menu transcribed and map rectified, users are supporting research in the humanities"

"Rag trade blog Fashionista reports that Vogue’s stealth website, currently under development for a December launch, will feature a digital version of every single number published since Arthur Baldwin Turnure started the magazine in the late 19th century. If you are a fan of fashion, this is huge news. If you’re not, it’s huge news. History is more than big decisions made by bigwigs in big buildings. It’s how we think, eat, buy, sing, move and dress. Vogue is, for better or worse, a prominent lens onto a substantial segment of our cultural mores. Not to mention, it helps to bring history alive when you can picture the details. Now there will be an archive of the sartorial side of those details."

"The Manhattan courthouse is famous for its clean architectural lines and grand outdoor staircase leading to Foley Square. But inside is a Dickensian maze of dark wood and battered cabinets. And paper. Tons of paper. Piles, boxes, and rooms packed with summonses, exhibits and briefs. So much paper. More than two million pieces in 80,000 new civil suits a year, with some 360,000 more files in the basement. Lawyers sometimes use hand-trucks to wheel in new stacks of documents. “We’ve run out of space to put the paper,” said Edward M. Kvarantan, one of the court clerks, while at the next table another clerk sorted through the latest piles to arrive at the court, at 60 Centre Street, where big civil suits are handled. When the file cabinets filled up, Mr. Kvarantan said, “we began to put the files on top of the cabinets, but it didn’t look very good.” The digital revolution has now, finally, and perhaps improbably, made it here to this courthouse, State Supreme Court in Manhattan, whose staircase is featured so often on television that some people would not be faulted for thinking it is a stage set for “Law & Order.” The court is the setting for the first full “e-court” in the state and is part of efforts by more than a dozen court systems nationally to move toward a paperless future that has come slowly to state courts, where old habits die hard. (Federal courts, and much of the rest of the world, have been online for more than a decade.) For the past year, New York State has for the first time been requiring lawyers in about 6,000 cases dealing with commercial disputes in the Manhattan courthouse to “e-file” their cases over the Internet. Clerks and judges then process the documents from the first gripe, through the spiteful arguments and on to the final rulings, all the while providing full public access — and all, at least theoretically, paperlessly."