Dickens’ London

Dickens’ London

Davie Perdue’s Charles Dickens Page

All Fiction Books Should Have Maps

All Fiction Books Should Have Maps

Wizard of Oz

The Princess Bride

Winnie the Pooh

“If I ruled the world, or at least a publishing company, all books would contain as much supplementary information as possible. Nonfiction, fiction—doesn’t matter. Every work would have an appendix filled with diagrams, background information, digressions and anecdata. And of course, maps. Lots and lots of maps.”

Read more and see more maps at The Maps We Wandered Into As Kids by Victoria Johnson

Sunday Batch – Open Source Resources

Books

The Digital Comic Museum archives ‘Golden Age’ comics that are in the public domain.

Google Books has a collection of old books and magazines. When you search, use the “full view” option to find materials that you can read and download in their entirety. You might also want to use the “date range” option to narrow your search to a specific range of publication dates.

The Gutenberg Project has also digitized many copyright-expired books and provides them in various formats for download or screen-reading. Because copyright laws vary different sites exist for Canada, US, UK and other countries.

Maps

The David Rumsey Map Collection is a collection of more than 20,000 historical maps documenting places throughout the world. The maps can be searched by area, by time period, or by cartographer. The David Rumsey Map Collection is also available as a Google Earth layer.

~ copied from Free Tech for Teachers

Photos

The Commons on Flickr (Previous post) is a good resource for students in need of images for multimedia projects for history, literature, and other content areas. A requirement of contributors to The Commons is that all images are made available without copyright restrictions. Here is a list of institutions contributing to The Commons.

Any search on Flickr can be modified to include only images that are sharable by using the Advanced Search and clicking on “Only Search within Creative Commons Content”.

By Phil Moore on Flickr

Gimp Savvy Copyright-Free Photo Archive – from three main sources: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

Multimedia

The DHD Multimedia Gallery has a collection of images, music, sounds, etc.

Browse the Wikimedia Commons by topic, location, type, author, license or source for images, sounds and videos.

Mashable has a good post here with descriptions of 26 sources for free multimedia.

Clip Art and Historical Comic Strips

There is no registration required (Yay!) at PD Clipart – a very large collection of public domain clipart.

Another large collection at the Open Clip Art Library also permits image editing.

The Comic Strip Library is an archive of stips predating 1923.

Your Places

If you know of other, especially better resources in the public domain, please share.

High-Tech Dickens

I’m not a city-lover and avoid crowds and noise when I can, but I would jump at the chance to explore many of them just to ingest the history.  I ever get to London, I will explore some of the places rich in literary history – places intricately laid out and described in the interactive map by David Perdue. (Via TYWKIWDBI)

Click for interactive map on David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page

Meanwhile, back in Canada, I will be vicariously touring London in Dickens’ time on the iPad via “Streetmuseum: Dickens’ Dark London”, YALSA’s  app of the week.

Streetmuseum: Dickens' Dark London

“An enriched graphic novel, this app explodes stories drawn from Charles Dickens’Sketches by Boz: illustrative of every-day life and every-day people, to create a real sense of place from a combination of striking monochromatic art and theatrical narration.” (YALSA)

There is also an Android version here.

I like to think Dickens would be tickled to see his works converted to graphic novels and interactive experiences, but it’s fun to think how technologies might have been explained to him in his time.  Rachel Walsh, a student at Cardiff School of Art and Design, created the work below to describe the Amazon Kindle e-reader to Charles Dickens. (via The Atlantic)

Designing a 19th Century Kindle: An E-Reader for Dickens