The story goes like this: Eugene Oscar Mohr Haberacker of Pennsylvania learned about the phonautograph in the late 1850s while attending Allentown Seminary (now Muhlenberg College) and went on to build one of his own which he used for giving demonstrations as a schoolteacher in Tyrone. Then, when news of Thomas Edison’s speaking phonograph broke…
Media historians tend not to think much of the use of the phonograph for secretarial dictation—the scenario where someone talks into it so that someone else can copy the recorded words onto paper afterwards. Maybe that’s because they see it as a misguided focus of nineteenth-century promoters, a dead end from which the phonograph needed…
Allow me to introduce the polyprimiad, a musical form anyone can use to produce works that are extremely long and continuously varied. The principle behind it would work nicely as the stuff of a conceptual artwork, but I’d hate to see it limited to that. I think it also has real aesthetic potential, even if…
This is my hundredth post at Griffonage-Dot-Com, and to mark the occasion I’ve pulled together new examples of some favorite techniques and subjects showcased here in the past. Think of it as a plate heaped up for you at the Griffonage Buffet and set down before you in place of the usual a la carte…
I’ve recently hit upon yet another improved face-averaging process, and to try it out I’ve turned (among other things) to one of the first datasets I experimented with back in 2014: portraits of the candidates in the Miss America competition. I hope you’ll find the results interesting. But the institution of Miss America itself has…
The principle is simple enough: average high school yearbook portraits, year by year, and line up the results in order so that we can see how norms changed over time. I’ve done this before, and so have other people. But I don’t think it’s ever been done in quite the way I’d now like to…
How often did recording artists visit recording laboratories to make records during the earliest phase of the recording industry, back in the late nineteenth century? How much did they get paid each time? Who were their piano accompanists, and how much did they get paid? What were the salaries of the recordists and other staff?…
Back in August 2016, I blogged about a hypothetical piece of software I wished were available: one that could conveniently and efficiently average large numbers of images by warping them to a set of user-defined control points (and without being limited to forward-looking human faces). Last year, I finally wrote some code of my own…
Image averaging is a powerful tool for revealing patterns in large sets of visual data, and one subject to which I’ve been interested in applying it for a while is the newspaper front page. Every newspaper has a layout that remains fairly consistent from day to day while simultaneously varying to accommodate whatever the day’s…
The Voynich Manuscript has been called the world’s most mysterious book, and with good reason. An illustrated codex written on vellum carbon-dated to the early fifteenth century, it contains page after page of text in a unique and unidentified script, provisionally called “Voynichese,” that has frustrated efforts at decipherment by seasoned cryptanalists for many decades. …
