Categories
African Architecture

Swahili Kingdom Images

ArchNet is very happy to announce a new collection of rare Swahili Kingdom images in its Digital Library, the James de Vere Allen Collection.

At present, this collection includes 185 black & white images of the Palace at Gedi, the Great Mosque of Gedi, the Kongo Mosque, the McCrindle house, and the Lamu cityscape, as well as other Kenyan sites.

Sourced from Mr. Allen’s archive, which he donated to MIT in 1988, the online publication of these images was made possible with the kind permission of the family of James de Vere Allen.

By mmacken

twitter: meganmacken

Director, Visual Resources Center and Digital Media Archive, Division of the Humanities, The University of Chicago.

My academic background ranges from classics and comparative literature to modern art and architectural history, and so, naturally, I am a librarian. I have graduate degrees in art history and library science, manage digital image and audio collections for the Division of the Humanities, and am always eager to collaborate across disciplines, universities, and even continents! I'm interested in exploring the library's role in Digital Humanities, not just as an archive for born-digital objects but as a locus for Digital Humanities centers. At THATCamp I'm excited to find out how others are visualizing data, especially to facilitate creative research and teaching in art and architectural history and film studies. How can visual data (still images, film, 3D models, etc) move beyond illustration and become a source for research? What kind of creative information retrieval interfaces do we need to do this? We've got metadata...let's make it work!