The TimesMachine

Back in September we joined the chorus of praise for the New York Times’ decision to make a whackload of their archives available free (Some NY Times Articles Now Free). Now the folks at the Times have shown once again that they really are interested in making their data available, this time by releasing a browser designed to view the free archives (which stretch from volume 1, September 18, 1851, through that of December 30, 1922). Called, naturally, the TimesMachine, the browser is in fact an online app that appears within your current browser. A few clicks at the beautifully smooth fly-out calendar take you to a page of thumbnails of the paper for that day. You have to elect to click on a page to get to an image that is readable: on the enlarged page, if you hover over a story you get a popup precis. Choosing that, for example, finally lands you on a legible PDF of the article you wanted.

July 2, 1867, NY Times, page 1, column 4

Those interested in what goes on behind the scenes might enjoy reading about how the archives were transferred from a vast multitude of TIFFs of pieces of the page into a knit-together, usable PDF image. It’s a pretty impressive tale of ingenuity and the power of technology to manipulate terabytes of data quickly. Eleven million articles were processed within 24 hours, for instance, thanks to the Times’ partner Amazon’s machines.

[via Boing Boing]