Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
A year ago I mentioned in passing that there was an iPhone app in which you could read the first year of Samuel Pepys’ diary. Aimer Media have now updated the app, to include another year (1661 as well as 1660), plus a few new features. From the blurb:
New reading engine allows night reading and smoother page turning.
Also included are enhanced and additional sharing options for email, twitter and Facebook, in particular by including links to PepysDiary.com
Accessibility has been improved with correct reading via VoiceOver of entries and buttons.
So, if you have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and want a bit more Sam in your life, head over to the app store, where it costs £1.19, which I’m guessing is $1.99 in the US. (Disclosure: The plan is that a small cut from these fees will come my way.)
I particularly like the parental guidance for the app:
Rated 12+ for the following:
Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes
Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor
Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity
Oh Sam!
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Monday 10 January 2011 | Pepys in the media
I was on a TV programme on BBC One in the UK today, The One Show talking about Samuel Pepys and diaries. I was only on briefly, but here’s the video if you want to see (I start around 40 seconds in):
I wrote a bit more about the filming on my personal site too, if you’re interested.
2 comments | Permalink | Thursday 13 January 2011 | Press for this site
Last weekend, at Culture Hack Day in London, Matthew Somerville and Clare Lovell made Pepys’ Shows. It’s a very simple fun thing: it shows a quote from Pepys’ diary about a random play, with a link to the relevant play at Matthew’s site Theatricalia. Click “freshen anew” to see another one of Sam’s mini reviews. Very nice.
1 comment | Permalink | Wednesday 19 January 2011 | Pepys in the media
Andrew Hamilton writes about a meeting in March…
Thanks to Michael Robinson, we have arranged March 13 at 5 PM at the Hunter’s Head in Upperville, Va., as a time and place to celebrate Sam’s 378th birthday. So far Todd Bernhardt and wife and Rex Gordon have accepted, along with several of my family, Michael and myself. We cordially invite other Pepysians to join us in a venison pasty and a toast to Sam. RSVP to Andrew Hamilton at jahamiltonjr@gmail.com before Feb. 23 so we can be sure of adequate provender.
So, if you’re able to get there, drop Andrew a line!
Those of you with a technological bent may be interested to know that I’ve packaged up a lot of the data behind this site into computer readable form that will make it easy for people to make new things.
There’s a lot more detail in the README file, which is also included in the 6MB zip archive of the data (no need to download that if you’re not a programmer-type person!).
All the files are in JSON format and include:
The text of more than 3,000 diary entries, including footnotes and links to relevant Encyclopedia pages.
A list of the categories used in the Encyclopedia, with their structure.
All the data about the more than 4,000 topics in the Encyclopedia: names, descriptions, Wikipedia links, latitude/longitude, shapes, categories, etc.
More than 300 thumbnail images of people included in the Encyclopedia.
That should be plenty of stuff for someone who likes exploring data to get their teeth into. We already have maps of places in the Encyclopedia and graphs of how often each Topic appears. But there must be a lot more interesting (and probably beautiful) things that could be done with all this. Pepys’ Shows, which I mentioned the other day used an early release of some of this data.
Do you have any ideas, even if you wouldn’t know how to make it yourself?
2 comments | Permalink | Saturday 22 January 2011 | New features