Joyful Internet List
A mostly unordered dump of different websites and online project that I find fun, interesting or useful (or all of the above). Skews toward history research but has a bit of everything.
- History, Literature, Philosophy, Archives and Things of That Kind
- Shopping
- Blogs, Podcasts & etc
- Resources
- Education
- Other Fun Stuff
History, Literature, Philosophy, Archives and Things of That Kind
- The Teletext Museum Website archiving the history of teletext with examples from all over the world.
- Viabundus A map of early modern European roads covering the north Germanic area through to the Balkans and a hint of Russia at the edges, focusing on trade and mobility. Great fun to explore its travel data and route generation. Did you know in 1500 it took 9 days to travel from Frankfurt am Main to Nürnberg and you would pass through 7 toll stations.
- Ramsay Ledger A subset of the ledger of 18th century colonial American merchant William Ramsay presented in wonderful website form.
- Open Domesday A free online copy of the Domesday book with mapping of locations, directories of people and places, and high quality digitised reproductions of every folio.
- Children & Youth in History Online guide and primary source repository for the history of children and youth. Has plain text annotated and translated primary sources from around the world, guides to studying the topic and teaching modules.
- The Shakespeare Media Archive Collection of free video performances of and lectures on Shakespeare’s works.
- Collecting the Modern Library A site for collectors of the Modern Library book series with historical information and listings of the collection.
- Everyman’s Library Collectiong Similar to above but for the Everyman’s library series.
- Series of Series Great website cataloguing book series published in the 20th century, as far as I can tell only in English, great to think about popular literacy in the 20th century.
- David Rumsey Map Collection A large digitised searchable map collection.
- Reading Marx’s Capital With David Harvey Free lecture videos close reading Capital and other works of Marx by Professor David Harvey.
- UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive Archives the recordings of pre-vinyl audio-recording cylinders.
- Japan Air Raids Digital Bilingual archive of material related to air raids against Japan during the Second World War.
- Old Maps Online Exactly what the name says.
- Digital Humanities Awards Annual award given to digital humanities projects. Good for inspiration. Seems to have stopped in 2022
- Internet History Sourcebooks Project Free digital sourcebooks of all periods and areas.
- Geniza Lab Digitised material from the Cairo Geniza.
- Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute Collection of different consumer aesthetics.
- The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Exactly that in the barest HTML.
- Early Collaborative Games of Fantasy and Imagination History of 19th Century French fantasy and roleplaying games.
- archives.design A digital archive of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives
- Garden History Girl Nice blog about garden history.
Shopping
- Areaware Cute (and expensive) homegoods with playful designs.
- Lithograph Blankets Literary themed blankets, a little twee but nice.
- Superstitchous Throw Blankets Large, colourful, high quality, fruity throw blankets. Expensive and don’t ship to Ireland.
- Wolf and Moon Jewelry Nice jewellery brand.
Blogs, Podcasts & etc
- Low Tech Magazine The solar powered website of a great magazine, imagining how to live sustainably and beautifully with homebrew tech.
- The Html Review An experimental online art journal.
- mari katayama studio Interesting Japanese Photographer.
- Polish Fashion Stories
- History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
- Notebooks A long maintained personal website, good to explore.
Resources
- Irustoya Charming and free Japanese clip art.
- Public Domain Image Archive A large and well presented archive of public domain images. Explore in infinite mode!
- Data Viz Project Lovely list of different styles of data visualisation with clever search terms for finding the one’s best suited to your needs.
- World Historical Gazetteer DH project for location data.
- ASCII Art Archive
- Seasons in Pentameter Site that shows the Japanese (and Chinese I believe) microseasons.
Education
- Eloquent JavaScript Free and excellently presented online textbook for self-studying JavaScript
- Kattis Online Programming Puzzles.
- A User’s Guide to the Z-Shell
- Persian Language Online A quite comprehensive website with free materials for learning Persian.
- MDN Curriculum Free online course for web development.
Other Fun Stuff
- Explorable Explanations A directory of small online games designed for learning, great fun to explore.
- What’s on the Golden Record The audio contents of the golden record sent to the depths of space on the Voyager spacecraft.
- Tilemaker Learn about Islamic art by maing digital tile patterns.
- Killed by Google
- Rock Collections A collection of online collections, beautifully presented.
- Alphabet Soup for Picky Eaters A fun game.
- WikiShootMe! Shows a map of locations without pictures on their Wikipedia page for photographers to take a picture of and upload to Wikimedia.