The Irish are probably the most represented ethnic group in the Historic Images, New Technologies project cartoons. That's not great for the Irish. If any individual or group shows up with any frequency in political cartoons, you can be sure that most, if not all, of these representations will be negative. And the Irish were a favorite punching-bag for one of the most innovative and influential illustrated humor magazines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Puck.

We’ve been making a lot of technological progress on the Historic Images, New Technologies (HINT) Project. My colleague Cat Lu has highlighted the exciting capabilities of the new HSP image viewer and annotation tool in a great blog post. We now have the ability to annotate images by drawing shapes around details on an image and associating a text box—containing transcription or commentary—with that portion of the image.

[Editor's note: the following blog post was written a few weeks prior to publication. The cigarette tax legislation mentioned in the first paragraph was just signed into law.]