Archive Tumblr Fun: Announcing a Year of Tumblr Residencies

Last year a group of inspired digital residents created fantastic tumblr’s using the things they found interesting in the Internet Archive.   We’re proud to unveil these projects, one per week, throughout the year. They’ll each be posted at the Internet Archive tumblr and then be accessible at their own URL once posted. Follow the IA tumblr to see them as the project rolls onward! So far, we’ve seen two projects posted.

History of LinuxThis week’s project, A History of Linux Websites, by Steven Ovadia, traces the history of Linux through the screenshots of the web sites of Linux distributions and projects. Looking at the screenshots gives viewers insights not just into the various histories of the various distributions, but also provides insight into the web design aesthetics that guide these distributions. In many cases, the design aesthetic of the web site does not match up against the philosophy of the distribution, making for an interesting tension.

Most Frequent Search TermsThe first, Most Frequent Word Search by Jeff Thompson, is an algorithmic-curatorial project which uses the 250 most-frequent unique words in the oldest text with a date listed in Project Gutenberg – “Old Mortality, Volume 2” by Sir Walter Scott. Each word is used as a seed for a new search into the Archive. The most common word in the resulting text is used as a new search term. The process is repeated until the search returns no results. The project features a unique original theme with click and drag functionality, allowing users to aesthetically arrange the computationally generated and randomly displayed results, if they wish to attempt to seek their own patterns.

We hope you’re as excited as we are to see each project completed and unveiled after months of hard work by our digital residents. We’ll see you at internetarchive.tumblr.com!

Thank you to Ian Aleksander Adams for making this happen.

One thought on “Archive Tumblr Fun: Announcing a Year of Tumblr Residencies

  1. Sarah

    Thanks for that great Linktip – I just had a look through the different Tumblrs and was surprised to see that many interesting websites. Without your work most of them probably would be forgotten, so thanks for this great project.

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