Personal Interests & Web Sites
Above left: American Radiator Building
from Bryant Park, 5/18/2001.
Above center: Empire State Building from 34th Street,
near Penn Station, enshrouded in fog 1/5/2001.
Above right: Sledders in Fort Tryon Park 1/1/2001. All
come from my NYC pictures.
These are notes and links for my personal interests,
while on the road or for sharing with friends.
- Bookish: printing and publishing history; type and
typography, especially after Caslon; fine press books; rare books and the book trade, especially
Americana; fakes, forgery and facsimiles.
- Letterforms and Writing: history of letterforms and
writing, especially the changes in American writing from 1700-1850 as
"round hand" gave way to "Spencerian" hands. (On my to-do list:
create links for working on handwriting, especially stray textbooks
that have been digitized.)
- Digital Data Issues: Meta data,
especially for web pages; accessibility
to web sites for disabled users; SGML and databases on the Web;
imaging and authentication of data; technological convergence.
- Conservation and Historic Preservation: Conservation of paper, photographic
and other materials; ethical, artifactual and aesthetic issues in
conservation treatment or restoration; local preservation efforts.
- Genealogy: genealogy
and family history; technological genealogical standards and research
tools; intersection between genealogy, local history and institutions.
- Photography: I take a lot of photographs; most of them now
digital. See my Galleries.
- Other interests: English and Latin literature (see Humanities & Literature Links);
textual editing; classical music and opera;
the history of religion; photography and stereocards; local
history of the lower Hudson region
and upper Manhattan. I am interested in the history of religions,
especially early Christianity (up to Scholasticism in the west),
revivalism and Unitarianism in the US, and Mahayana Buddhism.
For friends and family: links to my
photographs. Other personal interest pages:
Why
these pages
Most of these web pages started as notes responding to repeated
questions from friends or researchers. From boilerplate text for e-mail
I expanded the notes and eventually mounted them as a sort of online
"Frequently Asked Questions." A few pages were mounted to share as
preliminary research, although most of these pages were subsequently
retired. The photo gallery pages shared
some pictures and helped me learn about creating fast-loading
web pages using thumbnail images.
The genealogy pages, both
general links and personal, responded to questions, which ranged from
basic how-to-start, to fairly complex queries (is your grandfather
related to so-and-so). The short biographies helped to differentiate my
line and were fun to write. I've met some wonderful people through
these webpages. A number of such e-mail "meetings" resulted in an
invitation to the Fort
Greene Tomb of the Martyrs (offsite at Rootsweb). Thanks!
A few pages were uploaded as placeholders or online reminders for
tracking personal collections when on the road. The Gallery has links to some, while the Stereocards page has
others.
This personal site has also been a sandbox for trying out ideas such
as those described in Research & Notes,
such as Meta tags, DublinCore, imaging, and databases.
Web trick: Ideas that I haven't used here? I maintain this site by
hand, with a text editor. However, the American Printing History
Association website is maintained with Microsoft Frontpage (2002-2008). Frontpage's
Scheduled Page feature is used extensively in the APHA website's calendar
(especially the Regional Chapters). When an event is past, the same
Scheduled Page feature will have the same event appear on a Past Events
page. (Frontpage is using the SHTML feature available on most servers,
but SHTML doesn't permit scheduling.)
