I’m off to enjoy some much-needed family time down in lovely Lake Charles, LA this week. Here’s to the land of lagniappe, boudin, and Community Coffee!

This week I fulfilled a long-time goal of mine, which was to volunteer with the group that puts on Shakespeare on the Common every summer here in Boston. The closest I had gotten up til now had been to sign up for Commonwealth Shakespeare Company newsletter during one particularly cold day last winter, but promptly forgot about it. Then last week the call went out for volunteers, and here was this incredibly easy sign-up form for me to fill out! At work, no less — I do love me a social transaction that I can accomplish entirely online.

So this Wednesday (and Thursday) I left work a little early, hiked up Joy Street to the Common, received a very stylish “STAFF” t-shirt, and was promptly put to work handing out programs and collecting donations.

They were long nights — two hours of working, three hours of show, and then another hour of hauling chairs and breaking down tents — but satisfying ones. It brought back memories of heading to Shakespeare in the Park with my family as a kid, and of hanging out behind the scenes at various ArtFest events.

This summer’s production of All’s Well that Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known and more problematic plays in that it resolves itself in a rather murky way (or not at all, depending on your point of view). I had no previous experience with it, so I came to both the plot and the production with fresh eyes. I’m looking forward to sitting in the audience next week and experiencing the whole things from start to finish!*

I was volunteering for both a preview performance and opening night, and it was clear some of the kinks were still being worked out. It was particularly neat to watch the cast and crew after the first show, working through scenes on stage in a completely empty Common.

The one thing I did observe as a volunteer were the impressive preparations of the audience prior to the show. While several Park Rangers were on hand to make sure no one was enjoying wine on the Common, people set up the most amazing picnic feasts in the hours leading up to the show. One group had a full dining table set up, complete with cutlery and glassware!

* I won’t be going quite that far, but I am hoping to pull together something cool for when I meet up with the lovely Cris to watch a performance next week.

The annual trek down to the Cape is upon us! I shot three rolls of 120mm film on my Holga last summer, and then heartlessly allowed them languish at my old roommate’s place until only a few months ago. It was such a treat to open them up when it was still cold and rainy here in Boston!

The weather that week was warm, humid, and cloudy cloudy cloudy.

Best shower in the world.

Tiny pants. :)

I did actually vacation with other human beings, fyi. But I saved those kind of pics for my — gasp! — Hipstomatic. I did break down a few times:

We also had a rogue photographer in the neighborhood, because I obviously didn’t take this one:

What have I got cooking? I’m so glad you asked.

I survived my first semester teaching, in no small part due to the number of evenings spent eating Old Bay fries and making ridiculous doodles with my design peeps:

I met a 6-hour old Mollie Danger, the world’s newest, tiniest superhero:

Spent St. Patrick’s Day with two authentic Irishmen and a handful of impostors. One of whom might have been a five day old superhero.

Went to Brimfield. Came back with piles of vintage maps and patent filings:

Flew home to wish my not-so-little brother a happy 30th:

Took a little trip. Enjoyed the ho hum view:

Up next: Cape Cod! I’ve already started the limoncello.

About a year ago I took a little drive with a friend of mine up to New Hampshire. Our goal of visiting a local farmer’s market turned out to be ill-fated, but our impromptu visit to a local used bookstore was not! I immediately fell in love with this beauty, for obvious reasons:

Unfortunately that trip also included a tour of Red Hook Brewery, and on the way home my lovely purchase came into untimely contact with a growler full of Oatmeal Stout. The beer was a total loss, but the book acquired notes of leather and coffee grounds. :)

The students in my web design class are currently working on a project involving collections. They have been tasked with gathering 10–15 objects or ideas that are meaningful in some way, and designing a website that presents the collection to a larger audience. As inspiration for the design phase, and as a way of getting them thinking about how to tell the story of their collection, I posted a few examples on our course blog. I think they might be interesting for a wider audience as well, so I’m reposting here.

A collection of collections

Since we didn’t quite have time to go through these in class on Friday, I’ve collected a few of the examples I was going to show here. Hopefully they give you some inspiration as you think about organizing and presenting your own collections!

Pictory
Pictory is a curated monthly collection of photographs centered around a theme, along with their associated stories. They manage to make an incredibly basic structure — all on one page, read vertically or using the left and right characters to jump from story to story — and make it interesting using a strong typographic grid and photographs. The level of curation is also really apparent: each story and photograph is powerful on its own, but the order they’ve chosen for the overall collection of photographs, emails, tweets, etc, has its own arc as well.

Sweet Gifs
Who doesn’t like animated gifs?! If you take the time to go through it, though, what appears to be simple is actually a massive collection. They’ve kept the presentation in the spirit of an animated gif itself — linear, repetitive, and with a good dose of ridiculous.

Lisa Congdon — A collection a day
An example of organizing and presenting a collection (in this case many many collections!) using the physical qualities of its contents.

Andy Warhol — Time Capsule 21
Ignore for the moment that this is kind of a dated Flash app, and take a look at the field of overlapping images that serves as the main “menu” to this collection. Sometimes a collection is interesting because of sheer volume alone, or because of the randomness of its contents. There is no order you can put things in that makes sense, really, so giving visitors the ability to sift through the clutter visually is an appropriate choice.

Clip, Stamp, Fold
An exhibition site done by the excellent folks at Project Projects, showcasing a collection that is notable not only for its physical qualities (different sizes, colors, proportions) but also for its evolution through time. By using a timeline filled with thumbnails that remain in proportion to their full-sized counterparts, you as the reader get two ways of accessing this collection in one.

Mass MoCA — Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective
If you haven’t made a trek out to the Berkshires to see this museum, and this collection, I highly recommend it! (The LeWitt show in particular will be installed for something like the next 25 years, so you’ve got some time.) Like the previous example, this site gives its users multiple ways of engaging with a collection — showing them all in a grid, and also locating them on a set of diagrams of the building itself.

This was also a nice example of choosing appropriate supporting materials: LeWitt left instructions for these pieces as opposed to finished work, knowing that any museum that chose to “install” the piece would effectively create a completely unique visual form. Knowing this, including a time lapse of each piece as its made is a really nice choice.

PhilaPlace
A collection of stories about in Philadelphia over the course of several centuries. Something we’ve all seen, I’m sure, but with the twist of dropping a very modern Google-style pin map on top of an historic map of the city.

MoMA — Bauhaus Retrospective
Pardon the second reference to Flash, but this was also a nice example of organizing and presenting more historical information.

Miranda July — No One Belongs Here More Than You
Ok, so this isn’t technically a collection. But I wanted to include it because it illustrates so beautifully how simple a website can really be. Its one linear loop of pages, made solely using images and a “next” button, and yet it’s an incredibly effective narrative.

Miranda July — Learning to Love You More
This site is hard to actually read, so proceed with caution when using it as inspiration graphically. But the premise of the site is interesting — it’s a collection of “assignments” for other people to complete and respond with their results. An intangible collection that elicits tangible feedback.

Michael Beirut’s The 100 Days Project in Design Observer
Not exactly related to what we’re working on in class, but an incredibly interesting article nonetheless! Consider it a bonus.

In celebration of Texas Independence Day, I went looking for our original currency. Images from Crutchfield’s Currency.

I’m not sure if this is the case anymore, but when I was in college the career center offered various free aptitude tests to help its students figure out what they wanted to be. One of these was the Myers-Briggs Strong Interest Indicator (I took Myers-Briggs as well, but didn’t save the results), which I took in the fall of my junior year at age 20.

It was a long test, with a lot of questions about activities I liked, and the things I was good at. After I headed home that day, the system (I think it was digital at that point) crunched the numbers and spit out a summary of what potential careers would be the best for me. I took that report and filed it away — literally and figuratively — until this past weekend, when I discovered it while organizing some papers.

At the time I remember being a little surprised at my results, given that I was a Business major embarking on a career in consulting. A dozen years later? It makes a LOT more sense.

Seeing dental hygienist on my list of “recommended” careers cracks me up. I remember very clearly as a kid wanting to be to either be a dentist or an archeologist. Not because I particularly liked teeth or history, mind you, but because in my head they both involved cleaning things.

The image at top is also telling for me — even as a kid I was always kind of a generalist. I didn’t have one particular thing I was sensational at, but I could be counted on to be reasonably good at a lot of different things. Seeing that predicament echoed, even at 20, seems like both the source and the outcome of most of my problems. :)

I have to admit, I’ve had some pretty memorable experiences with museums and the works of art contained there: the very crowded visit to the Royal Academy of Art in London, where at 11 I first remember understanding what “studying the light” meant after seeing half a dozen of Monet’s cathedral hanging next to each other; the time a coat check attendant at the National Gallery of Art snuck me into a completely sold out Van Gogh exhibit, and I ended up and entering the last room of the show through a secret door that dropped me squarely in front of Harvest in Provence; the first art show I went to in Providence, where the What Cheer Brigade randomly stopped by, turning what was otherwise a quiet poster show into a sweaty Mardi Gras dance party; and then there was the afternoon class spent in the rare books room of the Brown library, where we casually leafed through the Gutenberg Bible.

With the possible exception of that last one, the one thing you couldn’t do in any of those experiences was get really super close to the painting and experience what the canvas was like, how thick the paint was, the level of obsessive attention to detail in the brush strokes, etc. The think I’m loving about the  Google Art Project is that you can zoom in to levels that would give any reputable docent a heart attack.

The Starry Night — Van Gogh

Holbein is particularly fun to look at because he was known for writing teeny tiny messages in his paintings.

The Ambassadors — Hans Holbein the Younger

The Merchant Georg Gisze — Hans Holbein the Younger

At top, The Bottle of Anis del Mono by Juan Gris.

(Thanks to Jason for sending this to me!)

Google released a remarkable tool this past week called the Google NGram Viewer. It provides a simple interface to over 500 years of digitized books housed in the Google Books archive, and allows you to search that corpus for different words, as well as download the data set and explore it for yourself. The scope of that is mind boggling — when its done (at last count Google had digitized only 11% of the published corpus, in only five languages) you’ll be able to quickly search through all of the books we’ve ever published.

Repeat after me: I love the internet.

In light of this awe-inspiring technological development, I decided to test it out with my own brand of heavy-hitting linguistic and cultural research:

View the real chart here.