Fridaygram: art project expands, tweeting in tongues, speaking to movies
By Scott
Knaster, Google Developers
Blog Editor
We posted
once
before about the
Google Art
Project, a very cool endeavor to make museum art available online to people around
the world. We’re writing about it again today because the
project
has just expanded to include a bunch of great new stuff, including ancient works,
contemporary art, and even urban art.
Highlights of the newly added works include hundreds of
photos
from highly regarded photographers,
centuries-old
maps, and
historical
documents. You can spend hours exploring museums from more than 40 countries while
you sit in the park with your laptop.
Speaking of traveling without actually moving, a researcher has used public Twitter data to
study the use of human languages in
various places around the world. Researcher
Delia Mocanu and her team
studied languages from tweets sent in New York City and used the data to
map
neighborhoods by language use. In some cases, the secondary language used in a
neighborhood matched the language spoken by original residents decades or even hundreds of
years earlier. That’s even before Twitter existed.
Finally, when you’re done looking at art and learning about world language use, you can spend
some time this weekend with Chrome’s new
Peanut
Gallery. This project uses Chrome’s voice recognition technology to let you add
title cards to old silent films. It’s completely for fun – enjoy!
Get your API info and meaty technical details earlier in the week, because on Friday it’s
all for fun: science, the humanities, and just general nerdiness.
