Profile picture
, 6 tweets, 3 min read
My Authors
Read all threads
During the New Deal, the WPA and the NYC Tax Department sent photographers to every municipal building in the five boroughs, producing a geotagged archive of the city's streetscenes from 1939-41.

1/
These images were placed in an interactive map system by @julianboilen, called "Street View of 1940s New York," which lets you click around a map of the city to navigate these photos geographically.

1940s.nyc/map#13.69/40.7…

2/
It's a legit masterpiece, and endlessly fascinating, a veritable time-machine.

3/
One note: Boilen says that the use of the images is limited to NYC's terms and conditions, but these were federally commissioned works and are presumptively in the public domain.

4/
The NYC guidelines basically say, "Don't violate copyright." These are neither copyrighted nor copyrightable. As far as I can tell: you're good.

www1.nyc.gov/site/records/a…

5/
PS: Don't miss the photographers' outtakes, which are a delightful mix of impromptu portraits, fatfingers, and bloopers:

1940s.nyc/outtakes#16.69…

eof/
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh.

Keep Current with Cory Doctorow #BLM

Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime, convert it as a PDF, save and print for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video

1) Follow Thread Reader App on Twitter so you can easily mention us!

2) Go to a Twitter thread (series of Tweets by the same owner) and mention us with a keyword "unroll" @threadreaderapp unroll

You can practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @doctorow see all

Profile picture
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The digital rights movement has a longstanding hostility to the term "intellectual property," raising two objections to the term:

1. It's incoherent: patents, copyright, trademarks and other "IP" have little in common with one another in their rubrics or contours.

1/
2. "IP" was deliberately promulgated in the 1960s/70s as an alternative to the age old term, "author's monopoly," a term that warned us that lurking beneath any government grant of exclusivity to ideas or expressions was a monopoly with all its problems.

2/
Now, creators have long bristled at this second objection, pointing out that getting a copyright didn't make you a monopolist in the sense of having "market power" - the ability to set prices and terms for your products.

3/
Read 19 tweets
Profile picture
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Genomist @AdamRutherford is a gifted science communicator; the podcast he co-hosts, "The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry" is one of the best popular science programs I've ever heard: charming and informative at the same time.

bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07…

1/ Image
His 2017 book "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived" used a survey of the state of the art in genomics to present an account of what we knew about human relatedness.

boingboing.net/2017/07/03/the…

2/
The most compelling part of "Brief History" was Rutherford's skewering of junk DNA sciecne, especially the home ancestry/genetic testing industry, with its claims of being able to tell you if you're 32% viking and if so, which red wine you're genetically programmed to enjoy.

3/
Read 21 tweets
Profile picture
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
I'm a science fiction writer, so I quite enjoy thinking about self-driving cars. They make for really interesting analogies about data, liability, self-determination, information security and openness.

1/
Sometimes I write fiction about this! Deakin University commissioned "Car Wars," a short story about the sociotechnological issues raised by autonomous vehicle thought-experiments.

this.deakin.edu.au/self-improveme…

2/
(they also got a faculty member to write a quiz for it whose correct answers take a 180' different view to my own!)

3/
Read 16 tweets

Embed code for your website

×
Follow Us on Twitter!

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3.00/month or $30.00/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!