Today's blog is a short one, since you will probably want to spend your online time somewhere else: The Walters Art Museum has a new database online - under a creative commons license.

Their collection database can thus be browsed and the pictures used for non-commercial purposes - like private research. You can read more about the creative commons license here, and this link will transfer you directly to the searchable Walters Art museum database.

I've been on Facebook and LinkedIn and Xing for quite some time now, and yesterday I finally joined academia.edu. I'm not sure anymore why I did not go there and sign up when I first heard about it, but probably I was intending to wait and see whether it would take off or not. And then I sort of forgot about it.

So I'm very glad a colleague on the weekend nudged me to go there again and sign up. The idea behind it really is brilliant - a place where you can put up links to your work, copies of your articles, your academical CV - and at the same time see what others do and follow their work. It feels like a mix between Facebook and Google Scholar for me.

I can be found here on academia.edu - care to join me?

You will probably all know, or at least have heard of, the project in Guedelon, where a medieval castle is being re-built using materials and methods available in the 13th century.

Guedelon does seem to be a success, at least in terms of being well-known and visited. And now something similar-but-different is planned in Germany, called "Karolingische Klosterstadt" (Carolingian monastic city).

The project is to re-build the famous plan of St. Gallen, the idealistic layout and plan for a monastery. There's an official project website that does not offer very much yet, but there's one English pdf presenting the project idea - and some very interesting thoughts about how interpreters should be trained.

There has been a project resulting in the virtual reconstruction of 1350 Bergen in Norway. If you can read Norwegian, you might be interested in the official accompanying page here. There's even a .pdf on that page about the basis for the reconstruction - brilliant!
If you don't read Norwegian (or don't feel like it) and only want to see the film, you can do it right here:



(or follow it over to its home on youtube, where you can watch it in much bigger).

On a modern textile blog (catering to industrial production mostly) you can find some facts about linen (drawn from a modern linen producer). The fact that is missing there is that while linen has very high tensile strength - which means you can hang a lot of weight from a thread - it is actually not very resistant against friction, wearing through relatively fast. Still, it's an interesting list.

If you're waiting to see the TARDIS in a cathedral, at least in a photo, go visit highlyeccentric's blog. I am officially stunned.

HistoriAnn and Notorious PhD blog about conference etiquette and the job of a panel commentator, respectively. If you're going to conferences or being in the danger of moderating/commenting a panel, I do recommend these posts and their discussion.

If you are wishing to learn about medieval beans and how to prepare a bean dish, go read Andreas' recounting of a cooking test run (he's giving a seminar in fall).

But if that all is not tickling your fancy, you can always hop over to the Yellow Press of Medievalist Studies* and learn about medieval flamethrowers. Yes, flamethrowers!

* I realise that this may be a bit harsh - but I get their RSS feed, and that is just what I sort of think when all the flashy titles pop up. Yes, I know that much of it is the scholar's own fault. Yes, I'm doing that myself. I discovered medievalists.net a while ago and was totally excited for a time, but learned soon that their offerings (as always, duh Katrin) has to be taken with some salt. It's a service that will dig up articles and stuff about the Middle Ages, but they are not a peer review organ, and there will be outdated or disputable papers on there. That said, I still like to get the feed, if only to learn about medieval flamethrowers once in a while. And now this footnote is almost getting longer than the rest of the post.

There's a flood of pictures in our lives, and everybody who likes to wield a digital camera will know how long it takes to sort and tag all the photos. Plus there's a growing amount of digitised historical pictures - statues, paintings, manuscript pages - that are available on the internet or on CDs and DVDs. And these are best and easiest to use if they are properly tagged so you can look for, say, a distaff. Or a donkey. Or whatever.

And IT people are actually working on this - they are working on image recognition software that will be able to recognise, say, a crown. Or a distaff. Or a donkey. or whatever, and all that on historical source material that has been digitised.

There's a full article (in German) about that over on Spiegel, in case you are interested.

The week before last, I had a nice evening with a fellow textile person who is researching about Peruvian backstrap weaving (connected with a find of a woven band). During our evening together, we scourged a bit of the Internet for weaving patterns and instructions, and stumbled across this:

Introduction to Backstrap Weaving

It's a nice, concise and very well-made introduction, and in case you are interested at all - go check it out. A few lightbulbs went off over my head during the course of the evening and the reading of the article, and that's always something nice to share.