Anthro Daily Widget

The American Museum of Natural History’s Anthropology Division has been very busy vamping up their web site. Among the many things they’ve been doing is scanning in images of the half a million objects in their collection. So far 125,000 of these images are available online.

Unfortunately, their web designer insists on using awful javascript pop-ups on nearly every link in the site. I could barely use the site without first installing this greasemonkey script for Firefox which re-writes all the pop-up scripts to direct links. (Note to developers: Leave it up to the user whether or not to open a link in a new window! And please test your site on browsers which enable pop-up blocking, like Firefox.)

On the plus side, they have written this neat widget that works with Mac OS X 10.4.

Anthro Daily is a Dashboard widget that presents a different object every day from the ethnographic collections of the Anthropology Division of the American Museum of Natural History. The widget updates daily and links to the Anthropology Division’s website where you can research our comprehensive collections database.

P. Kerim Friedman is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, in Taiwan, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology. He is co-director of the film Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!, winner of the 2011 Jean Rouch Award from the Society of Visual Anthropology. Follow Kerim on Twitter.