with 'minneapolis' tag

spoonbridge and cherry

it is cold here. and yes, this is probably one of the most over-photographed things in minneapolis. other pictures i took today will need a bit more massaging once i get back home.

yesterday’s news is a brilliant blog from the minneapolis star-tribune which highlights old items from their archives. it’s a brilliant idea that every newspaper should adopt. especially the los angeles times.

it sounds like the star tribune doesn’t have its archive digitized, and the blog’s writer is working from microfilm. you can access the archives of the los angeles times going back to 1898 online (but only from the central library), and back to 1986 from anywhere.

i wonder what it would take to get the archives of some of defunct newspapers of los angeles online, like the los angeles herald-examiner and its predecessors. the library has it on microfilm. but you can’t really do a full-text search of microfilm. (what would be ideal is images of the pages and plain-text of each of the articles. pulling out clean text of articles is obviously a lot more work than just doing an optical-character recognition job on the page images to do a by-page full-text index.)

reflections on minneapolis

while i was home, we took the light rail from the mall of america into downtown minneapolis, walked around, and had lunch at the foshay tower.

looking at the pictures i took, an obvious theme emerged. and it seemed highly appropriate for where my head has been at lately. (it’s that time of year.)

there’s also some less thematically tied pictures.