Abstract

Only a few of these original copies exist and one resides at the Missouri Botanical Garden Research Library, one of the largest botanical libraries in the country. A few years ago Taschen approached the library to make a new edition. After making very high quality scans for Taschen the library converted the files to jpeg 2000 and uploaded them as archival web quality images to the Biodiversity Heritage Library online.

A piece of software was written to compare pixel by pixel the high quality scan of the book and the digital online surrogates. If the color value of the same pixel from the two files was the same, the produced pixel was black. If the pixels were different, the color difference was produced. In doing this for all pixels, images that represent the loss in quality or color shift between the two files was produced.

Writers were asked to write a new page to reimagine Wild Bill. The fifteen articles presented here all have a new page 278 and represent what might have, could have, or possibly did happen to Wild Bill.

The original Harpers PDF is available here and the new pages that were written are available here.

I would like to thank all of the writers that participated in this project:

Meredith Bak, Mike Bryant, Tejas Desai, Clarrisa French, Glenna Jennings, Antony John, Louisa Loewenstein, Peter Mann, Wythe Marschall, John Murray, G. Parker Nathans, Nina Rao

In 2007 the University of California Libraries scanned in the pages of this book and uploaded the files to archive.org. Archive.org is an online digital repository akin to Google Books, with over 1.5 million digitized books. After the files were uploaded the content of the book was automatically extracted and a variety of digital book formats were created, including one for the Kindle.

A piece of software was written to take a page from the original book and cover up any content that was extracted with a black box. By repeating this process for every page in the original book, a new book was created that shows only the layout of the original book, that was lost in the digital copy, and leaves uncovered the content that was unable to be converted into the digital version.

Over the span of five months, San Diego-based artist Tim Schwartz will travel across America making week-long stops at historical societies, art institutions, and local archives to engage with communities and their archived pasts. In each location he will work with local volunteers and archivists to gather and represent data that is emblematic of their community. In so doing he will activate discussions focused on how communities can take hold of their own information in new and dynamic ways, and at the same time, create a system for comparing and contrasting the various communities visited.

The STAT-US mobile research laboratory will be the primary point of engagement with the public. This laboratory is a 22 foot 1957 Airstream trailer that has been converted into a research space. The laboratory will also act as an archive for the project, storing all of the information collected in various formats.

This project builds upon Schwartz’s previous work in exploring the relationship between information and culture. One previous piece, Command Center, uses antique analog gauges to visualize the prominence of specific terms from the New York Times archives (1851-2008), suggesting the cultural preoccupation of Americans at different points in history. Expressing historical trends in a physical form will be one of the techniques used inside STAT-US: over two hundred analog gauges installed in the trailer will enable the potential for expressing innumerable semantic and statistical relationships within communities. Geohistoriography is similar in content (the perspective of America as based on the New York Times archive) but is represented in distorted maps, whereby the scale of a country is directly proportional to the number of references that nation received in the New York Times. A similar mapping of information will be incorporated into the piece: custom maps and information visualizations will be produced for each community visited.

Nozzles at the top of the sculpture spray salt water onto the sculpture which in turn rusts the iron. The piece was first installed at the Oceanside Museum of Art and then shown at compactspace gallery in Los Angeles.

This piece was constructed through the analysis of over 10,000 documents saved by an anonymous conspiracy theorist from September 19, 2001 to January 15, 2009. The frequency with which a country is mentioned in these documents dictates the size of that country. For example, Israel and Iran are each heavily discussed in these documents and therefore appear to be much larger in this map than in reality.

This piece was produced for the Greater LA MFA Show 2009.

The installation consisted of two large table maps made out of wood. One shows North and South America, while the other shows Europe, Asia and Africa. Country names were left off the maps, in order to challenge visitors’ own understanding of the world.

Last year I wrote a data mining application that can automatically gather term usage data from the New York Times website. I used this data for a number of my projects including Geohistoriography and Command Center. I have just released a public version of the graphing interface for others too explore and add terms to. Please don’t judge me by the stability of the interface, some elements are rather beta, and in general the page can be quite processor intensive because of all the flash, but I hope you enjoy exploring how the New York Times has used terms since 1851.

The two wall drawings are representations of the 2008 state of America’s view of the world. In one piece countries were morphed and expanded or contracted if they were written about more or less than average. In the pyramid piece, countries were organized in a ranked fashion depending on this same data.

The animation shows how America’s perspective changed over the last 150 years.