What a beautiful and fascinating website!
This is a layered interactive narrative that traces the life of Captain Antonio DaCosta, a Black Portuguese sailor who visited Japan in 1597. From his early life as a slave in Lisbon to his voyage to Japan, this site weaves together his personal diary and drawings, along with artwork and historical notes from 1500-1700, the Age of Exploration.
A collaboration between Zooniverse and the Imperial War Museum. Now citizen scientists can become citizen historians by classifying diaries from World War One.
Nine years and five months after he began publishing every entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary, Phil Gyford posts the last entry.
Phil Gyford was down in Brighton visiting the Clearleft HQ today. We’re working with him on Matter, which I’m very excited about.
Today wasn’t just any ol’ day for Phil. Today marks the end of a project of his that has been running for nine years and five months: Pepys’ Diary:
This site is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in London, England. A new entry written by Pepys will be published each day over the course of several years; 1 January 1660 was published on 1 January 2003.
We invited Phil down to Brighton last year to talk about Pepys’ Diary at a Skillswap event. You can listen to the audio on Huffduffer.
I’m a big fan of long-term thinking and—in web terms—this project is as old as Methuselah. It’s refreshing. In an industry so caught up in the churn and grind of the new and the shiny, I think it’s wonderful that Phil dedicated himself to a project that he knew would require a long-term investment of his time. Russell wrote about it in Wired recently:
In some worlds ten years isn’t very long: it’s not if you’re digging an undersea tunnel or discovering a cure for disease. But in the busy, silly world of early 21st-century media, making a ten-year assertion was a big deal — something akin to the Clock of the Long Now.
I’ll be sorry to see you go, Mister time-shifted Pepys. But I understand that it’s hard for you to keep writing a diary when your eyesight is failing.
The ill condition of my eyes, and my neglect for a year or two, hath kept me behindhand in my accounts, so as to render it difficult now.
— Samuel Pepys (@samuelpepys) May 31, 2012
This is wonderful: a line-a-day diary from the 1930s turned into a Twitter account. It's like a microblogging version of Pepys's journal via RSS.
In a similar treatment to the Pepys blog, the diary of George Orwell is being republished as a blog offset by 70 years.
Another nice barnacle app built on Twitter. Send direct messages to note what you've eaten... or tweeten.