By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog EditorWe 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of the newly added works include hundreds of photos from highly regarded photographers, centuries-old maps, and historical documents.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.
