Hasta La Ideas

“…[T]he Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it—anyway, the corpus of all public tweets. There are a lot. The library embarked on this project in April 2010, when Jack Dorsey’s microblogging service was four years old, and four years of tweeting had produced 21 billion messages. Since then Twitter has grown, as these things do, and 21 billion tweets represents not much more than a month’s worth. As of December [2012], the library had received 170 billion—each one a 140-character capsule garbed in metadata with the who-when-where.

The library has attached itself to the firehose. A stream of information flows from 500 million registered twitterers (counting duplicates, dead people, parodies, imaginary friends, and bots) who thumb their hurried epistles into phones and tablets and PCs, and the tweets pour into Twitter’s servers at a rate of thousands per second—tens of thousands at peak times: World Cup matches, presidential elections, Beyonce’s pregnancy—and make their way in ‘real time’ to a company called Gnip, a social-media data provider in Boulder, Colorado. Gnip organizes them into one-hour batches on a secure server for download, where they are counted and checked and finally copied to reels of magnetic tape, to be stored in a couple of filing cabinets. In different locations, for safety. If you have ever tweeted, rest assured that each of your little gems is there for posterity.”

–James Gleick considers “Librarians of the Twitterverse” on NYRBlog

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The fashion world was rather slow to board the digital bandwagon, but we’ve come a long way from conversations about fashion and technology that began and ended with Hussein Chalayan‘s famous table skirt. Now anyone can purchase (and sometimes rent!) last season’s Naeem Khan at a hefty Gilt discount and pre-order next season’s Eddie Borgo baubles (from Moda Operandi), while emerging designers are flourishing everywhere from Etsy and ModCloth to Fab and AHAlife. With New York Fashion Week approaching, Hearst is seizing the app-frenzied moment for a Fashion Hackathon.

Beginning on the morning of Saturday, February 9, participating developers and designers (register here) will get to spend 24 hours coding away in the company’s breathtaking Norman Foster-designed midtown HQ to create “innovative fashion-focused apps and programs on API platforms from sponsors,” which include Hearst brands (your ELLE, your Harper’s Bazaar…), Amazon, Facebook, and Google. The grand prize winner, as determined by a judging panel of Hearst execs, tech industry gurus, and VCs will receive $10,000 and an internship opportunity. Surprise guest appearances–fingers crossed for that table skirt or better yet, a fresh-from-the-shows Glenda Bailey brandishing a tablet–are promised.

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Artist Chuck Close has described his work as “monumental in scale and brutal in detail.” The phrase is just as apt when referring to the painstaking process of cataloguing his oeuvre, according to Carina Evangelista, the editor of the Chuck Close Catalogue Raisonné. The just-launched publication puts a new spin on the form–a comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known works of an artist either in a particular medium or all media–as Chuck Close: Paintings, 1967-present also marks the official launch of Artifex Press, a New York-based startup dedicated to the production of digital catalogues raisonnés.

“Our catalogues are every bit the equal of the catalogues raisonnés you know in book form,” said Artifex Press editor-in-chief David Grosz at the launch event held recently at the New York Public Library. “We’re a publishing company, but we’re also a software company.” Grosz co-founded Artifex in 2009 with Pace Gallery’s Marc Glimcher. The Close catalogue debuted alongside Jim Dine: Sculpture, 1983-present, and will be followed by catalogues raisonnés of Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin. Projects are also in progress with contemporary artists including Tara Donovan, Thomas Nozkowski, James Siena, and Richard Tuttle.

With the help of a Macbook, Grosz and Evangelista clicked through a tour of the Close catalogue and its fuss-free functionality as the charismatic artist himself provided running commentary. “It’s a nauseating amount of images,” said Close, as they did a quick sort for self-portraits and his “Big Self Portrait” (1967-68, pictured above) filled the screen. “When I put this image in books I have to add a disclaimer telling kids not to smoke.” Later, it was on to archival photos. “Oh look, there’s Joseph Beuys looking at my painting,” Close said of a 1974 snapshot of the German artist sizing up a Close canvas. “I didn’t know he cared.”
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Admit it. Your seven-year-old nephew could out-HTML tag you any day and you think that a Cascading Style Sheet is something with a thread count. That’s where the Mediabistro mothership comes in. They’ve asked us to tell you about the upcoming online course in HTML and CSS. Over four semantically marked up weeks, web design design guru Laura Galbraith will guide you through a variety of web page production techniques, from column-based layouts and search engine optimization to HTML5 video and advanced CSS styles. The online learning fun begins January 29, and by Valentine’s Day you’ll have brought a pre-designed webpage to life. Preview the course syllabus and register here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

You can keep your five golden rings and arboreally ensconced partridge. We’ll take eleven exotic writing utensils, ten action figures a-leaping, and a Sesame Street screen saver. All of these wonders and more await you in Laurence King‘s “Twelve Desks of Christmas.” The London-based publisher behind covetable and creative titles such as Angus Hyland and Steven Bateman‘s Symbol and 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design by Steven Heller and Veronique Vienne engaged in a little office voyeurism this holiday season, posting photos of 12 mystery desks and inviting the world to guess whose was whose. Here are a few (recently de-identified) highlights, from our desk to yours:

See those books? He wrote all of them! This is the desk of Steve Heller.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.