Rhizome is an online community and publication  “dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.” The site includes contemporary examples of works investigating the intersection of art, technology and culture, with an archive dating back to the early 1990s.

Earthweek is a weekly newsource providing information about innovations and new discoveries in the earth sciences. This unique site is comprehensive, focusing on biological, geographical, geological, and meteorological topics that effect not only our daily life but our continued cultural and evolutionary existence. Climate change and issues of sustainability are paramount, though stories about the increasing rate of birth defects in Iraq following the 2003 invasion and pigeons with a pension for good art creep in too. The interactive map located on the site’s home page uses geography to link to Earthweek’s most current stories while providing a geographical context.

The American Society of Civil Engineers Database provides access to over 100,000 bibliographic and abstracted records from 1970 to the present. The associated Research Library can search 73,000 full-text articles from ASCE journals and conference proceedings and will be adding over 4,000 new articles each year. Though a subscription is required, these resources offer unprecedented access to research materials in the various fields of civil engineering.

German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of original historical materials documenting German history in ten historic periods ranging from the early modern period to the present. Each section includes an introduction to key historical developments as well as a selection of primary source documents (in German and English), images and relevant maps. All of the materials can be accessed through keyword and author searches. Advanced options also allow searches to be limited and refined.

Last Sunday, The New York Times featured a rather architectural crossword to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Puzzle designer, Elizabeth Gorski developed the puzzle entitled “Ahead of the Curve” around Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the building, incorporating themes relating to the museum, its purpose and its Golden Jubilee within an irregular spiral situated onto the grid (organized according to the parameters established to define Wright’s building).

Visit the Guggenheim website for more information about the 50th Anniversary and exhibits and events associated with its celebration. For more information about solving the puzzle read the Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle blog.

Unable to find the right word? the Visual Thesaurus, available through the VRC’s website, can help you explore concepts through their ever expanding word maps. Learn more by watching the video posted on YouTube.

Photo by Steve Brosnahan from The Glass House website.

The Philip Johnson Glass House Oral History Project gathers together the memories of Johnson’s friends and colleagues and has created two video documentaries in order to broaden our understanding of modern design. The first two films produced by the project, include Architecture and Influence, and Frank Stella: Return to the Glass House and are viewable here.

Founded by Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996, UbuWeb is the place on the internet to find avant-garde video, poetry, music and outsider art. UbuWeb is completely non-commercial and operates on a gift economy, relying on content and technical support from a wide variety of organizations and people.  According to the editors “UbuWeb embodies an unstable community, neither vertical nor horizontal but a rather a Deleusian nomadic model: a 4-dimensional space simultaneously expanding and contracting in every direction, growing rhizomatically with ever-increasing unpredictability and uncanniness.”

Rent textbooks from Chegg.com. The company gathers books at the end of a semester and rents or sells them at a fraction of the cost. Chegg also plants a tree for every book you rent, buy or sell.

Read more about the company in the New York Times article.

DocMorph is a free conversion tools that can convert more than 50 different types of files into different formats. With the online version, a user can convert individual files into PDF, TIFF, or text. MyMorph software, which you can download to your desktop, also allows one to migrate many files simultaneously.