The rise of digital newspaper archives has opened up many new possibilities for cultivating the periodical past. Old newspapers have obviously become easier to search and more convenient to read than they were before, but here I’d like to explore another novel opportunity we have for experiencing them: as motion pictures made up of long runs…
I wish I’d checked out the Mathew Brady collection at the National Archives a lot sooner. For the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with techniques for animating historical photographs, and I’ve had difficulty finding suitable material to experiment on—especially groups of three or more pictures taken at the same time from different perspectives. It…
Motion pictures of specific historical eclipses exist dating back more than 375 years. In this post, I’ll present some of the oldest surviving examples for viewing in motion for the first time (as far as I’m aware): eleven from the seventeenth century, four from the eighteenth century, and six from the nineteenth century. That makes…
You probably know that the phonautograms of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville are the world’s oldest records of airborne sound, and that we can play them back today as audio. But we can reconstruct another kind of motion from them as well. Many phonautograms contain all the information we need to assemble movies with sound in…
I’ve been exploring the possibilities of historical face-averaging here for some time now—that is, “averaging” groups of facial images from successive periods and then arranging them into timelines so that we can compare them side by side or, better yet, watch historical trends unfolding before our eyes as video animations. The reason it’s been a…
The wavy lines of time-based graphs can easily be converted into audio, as I explained in an earlier post. But we can also convert them into video, and in fact sound recordings were being played back as moving pictures in the 1860s, long before anyone had played one back as sound—another notable difference being that…
A few weeks ago, I blogged about using historical images of reflections in people’s eyes as a source for accidental stereoscopic images (although not very detailed ones). Now I’d like to consider a similar kind of source that could have a lot more potential: images of reflections in water. I’m interested mainly in bringing older…
