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Photoshop Battles

Let's be honest, the internet enables small pieces of brilliant. And many other things besides.
A picture is posted, gets popular and then people get creative with it just for the japes.

Here follows one of a number of examples of this process that I stumbled upon today. Indeed, there are people out there that invest effort into this intriguing pastime. Good on them.

Van driver and his mate in Fleet Street London today. John Madden photo. pic.twitter.com/fYeNblvKVZ
— John Madden (@Peddler_of_84) April 30, 2014

Internet you are brilliant. You spread things among strangers generating little ripples in lives wherever you reach. Don't ever go away.

Source

British Political and Tariff Reform Posters

Originally posted May 21st, 2012 on Out of the Box Tory Lords "controlling" the Commons. (1907/8) COLL MISC/0519/43

House of Lords reform, a shrinking Armed Forces, pension unrest and increasing food prices…
You could be forgiven for thinking we were talking about news topics from the weekend papers, but honestly we aren’t. These were just some of the issues being battled over by politicians in the most recent collection to go into the LSE Digital Library. Covering a period around 1892-1910 – when Britain was governed by Conservative and Liberal governments (but not at the same time) – are 88 British Political and Tariff Reform Posters.

McKenna's Navy Cut. (1908) COLL MISC/0519/59

The posters were produced on behalf of the Conservative and Unionist Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Party, the Liberal Unionist Council and the Tariff Reform League. They contain caricatures of key political figures of the time such as: Arthur Balfour (Prime Minister, 1902-1905), Henry Campbell-Bannerman (Prime Minister, 1905-1908), Herbert Asquith (Prime Minister, 1908-1915), David Lloyd George (future Prime Minister), John Redmond (Irish Parliamentary Leader,1900-1918), Joseph Chamberlain (Leader of the Liberal Unionists) and James Keir Hardie (1st elected Independent Labour Party Member of Parliament). Some of the themes of the collection of posters are the Second Boer War (1899-1902), Tariff Reform (and the conflict between Protectionism and Free Trade), the question of Irish Home Rule and issues around Immigration and the Empire.

  John Bull: "I'll give him Home Rule!" (1910) COLL MISC/0519/58

If you are interested in finding out more about the historical context and figures then I’d recommend some very accessible articles on Wikipedia such as the one for Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Joseph Chamberlain and the Tariff Reform League. If you want something a little bit more subjective and opinionated then I’d heartily recommend finding out what Beatrice Webb thought of the people and the issues. This is very easy to do now that her diaries are also available and searchable on the Digital Library. Meeting Joseph Chamberlain, a man that Beatrice was deeply in love with, is referred to as her “...catastrophe of my life”. One wonders if the LSE would even exist if it hadn’t been…

All images from LSE

Wellcome Images: AIDS Posters

A small selection of images from the Wellcome AIDS Poster collection.

Education, terror, advice and critique. Barmy cartoon characters also included. 

Boy in the photograph

Take another look at the boy in the foreground. The following text explains a little more about him. Surprised? I was:

"Little Mic-Mac Gosling," as the boy with the pitcher is familiarly called by all in his extended circle of friends and acquaintances, is seventeen years old, though he only reaches the height of three feet ten inches. He is, in fact, so small, and, at the same time, so intelligent for his size, that he once held an excellent situation as a lady's page; but I presume he is now getting too old for such an office. His bare feet, I should add, are not necessarily symptoms of poverty; for, as a sailor, and during a long voyage to South Africa, he learnt to dispense with boots and shoes while on deck.

The Impressive Crystal Palace

Girl in Pink

Girl in pink fading into nothingness. Words on chest 'I hate the way I look' x3. 2002, 1/5.

Big Mac and What

He caught me. I felt horrible and judgemental.
I am a bad person. Life bites.

LSE Library Selection

LSE Library Selection, a gallery on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
A selection of some of the best photos on flickr by, or of, LSE Library.

Where does all this library stuff come from? using MARC and Google to visualise

This is what happens when you take a large and generally representative sample of MARC records from your library, match up all the publication location codes with the Library of Congress MARC standards code list, put the numbers into a Google Doc, and run the 'Heatmap' gadget.

There was a reason to me having done this, but that reason no longer remains relevant. It was hard graft crunching data, so it would be a shame for me not to explain what it is and share. If you hover over the countries the numbers that you are faced with can be taken as the number of items from that country. Don't get hung up on them though, it's a sample and they would be better if they were percentages.

And what do I think of it? Well, clearly the US, UK, France and Germany are where most of the material comes from. Considering the history and background of the library which this data was sourced from I am not overly surprised that stuff published in Russia stands up quite well. Is that Soviet Russia though?

In isolation I guess the conclusions and comparisons that can be made are limited. In lieu of other libraries doing roughly similar things I'll never know the distinctiveness or uniqueness of this collection. One thing is sure though, that this collection is truly global in its coverage.

Earlsfield, London

From Scrapbook Photos