web resources

Like many other blogs we here at Biomedicine on Display have a long list of (potentially) useful life science and health/medical blog links—all those sites which together constitute the hypertextual inspiration base for our web presence. It would be great if these could be visualised as a blogroll cloud (like a tag cloud or a category cloud). So far […]

If you think the last post was too conventional, presentation-wise, try this word cloud version: Generated by Wordle, a free service designed by Jonathan Feinberg, which allows you to create a word cloud from any text or url, and adopt a variety of fonts, layouts, and color schemes. See Jonathan’s blog here. Nifty! Cannot handle pics though. Not yet — maybe […]

We have repeatedly come back to the art of medical animation on this blog. Although in principle we are more interested in animation of invisible biomedical microstructures, animations of classical macroanatomical structures are still a source of awe and fascination, especially when they are well-done. See, for example, this beautiful animation of a human heart: One thing is that it has an almost haptic quality […]

Participatory web media are increasingly being used for raising the medical scientific awareness of patients, caregivers and doctors (I guess this is the basic idea of ‘formation of biocitizenship’). Latest example is a video channel launched Monday by the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF in co-operation with YouTube: [biomed]H-rJgmVuV7Q[/biomed] with “the goal of promoting earlier diagnoses and getting more patients […]

Learning new software tools takes a lot of time, so I always take the opportunity to learn some basic tricks by looking over the shoulders of my colleagues while they handle the interface. But often my colleagues are as unknowledgeable as I am. The obvious solution then is video tutorials. There are thousands hundreds of them if you want to […]

Forget about designing your own animals, molecules, cells and labware on powerpoints. A company called Motifolio (I assume there is a host of similar companies out there) provides an array of custom shapes of biomedical objects: the whole mount of 700 scalable and editable clips costs 149 USD. Nifty — but like other standardized images and customised power point presentations they […]

Interesting websites come and go. There are pompous upstarts that fade out because nobody upgrades them, and there are more humble initiatives that flourish gradually. In the latter category is the Synapse website — a very useful tool, not just for us in the science, technology and medical museum world, but for anyone interested in art-science connections. The core of the site is […]

In the middle of April I attended the annual Museums and the Web conference, this year held in Montreal, Canada. It was 5 days of highly interesting sessions and I got back home loaded with information and inspiration that should hopefully be put into work in the near future. One of the great things about […]

Joanna Ebenstein, a NYC-based photographer and designer, spent a month travelling to medical museums throughout Europe and the US (see a list of visited museums here), to take photos of their collections of human remains and anatomical models, from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Her efforts have now been turned into a web gallery called Anatomical Theatre. The images on […]

If you are interested in seeing examples of how design and art orient themselves towards science (incl. biomedical science and bioinformatics) you can visit Museum of Modern Art’s supersmart on-line exhibition ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’. The exhibition is currently on show at MoMA in New York City (closes next Wed), but the online version will probaly be up […]

Lynn Bethke‘s MA thesis—‘Constructing Connections: A Museological Approach to Blogging’—from the Museology graduate program at University of Washington in Seattle (downloadable here) contains some interesting analyses of the benefits (and sometimes obstacles) of blogging for museums. “Museums and blogs have a future together”, she concludes her survey, “although the path is not yet clear”, and continues: The potential […]

Is the web taking visitors away from museums? Apparently not, if we shall believe a recent study from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US) which concludes that “the amount of use of the Internet is positively correlated with the number of in-person visits to museums and has a positive effect on in-person visits to public libraries.” For an overview […]