The Bayeaux Tapestry, one of the most important chronicles of its day, offers a vivid depiction of the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. A video available on YouTube from PotionGraphics brings the tale to life through animation and sound effects. The clip begins about halfway through the tapestry, at the appearance of Haley’s Comet, and ends at The Battle of Hastings.

Video discovered via Open Culture. The entire scroll is available to view here.

The Database of Virtual Art seeks to document and ultimately preserve the evolving field of digital installation art. The database is intended for both researchers and artists, and digital media artists are encouraged to post content themselves. The web-based resource is free and allows browsing by artist name as well as keyword. Works, literature, people, events and institutions may also be searched.

Pictured: The Living Web by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, 2002.

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.

TinEye is a helpful tool for identifying stray images as well. A stray slide without a label or a digital file without proper metadata may be uploaded and compared to similar images on the web. For answers to frequently asked questions about TinEye, or to view a short instructional video, click here.

More than 1,500 historic American television commercials from the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in the Duke University Special Collections Library are now available on iTunes U. This collection is called AdViews. Videos are free to download, and can be viewed at the computer or on video-capable iPods.

Most of the 1,500 currently available videos date from the 1950s and 1960s. A keyword search for “coffee” brings up eight albums, including a Yuban Coffee ablum with more than seventy commercials.

The total collection comprises 12,000 commercials and librarians at Duke hope to finish digitization by the end of 2009. Click here for more information.

accessCeramics is a free, web-based digital collection of contemporary ceramics created by recognized artists. In April, the project was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Access to Artistic Excellence Grant. The collection makes use of the robust metadata of a traditional digital library while comprising the openness and flexibility of Flickr. Designed for artists, art educators, scholars and the public, the project was organized by the Visual Resources Collection of Watzek Library and the Art Department of Lewis & Clark College.

For more information, click here.

Have you ever found yourself waiting for passersby to move out of your viewfinder? Perhaps while trying to photograph architecture or other works of art? A free web-based filter allows you to remove tourists and other unwanted moving objects from your photographs. The aptly titled Tourist Remover even allows up to 100 MB of storage (and more with a paid upgrade).

Read more about how the tool works here. Happy 4th of July picture-taking!

Collections from London’s National Gallery are the first to ever be accessible via a downloadable iPhone application. iPhone owners can now explore the museum’s galleries from anywhere in the world using a free (for a limited time) Pentimento application called Love Art.

Making use of special iPhone features such as its large touch-screen, zoom, Rolodex and scrollable menus, Love Art offers a playful exploration of the collection, together with informative commentaries. The paintings are showcased to the best advantage using high-resolution images on the iPhone’s excellent-quality screen. Due to a tactile interface the experience gained through this application is not only highly enjoyable, but also lets you zoom in to see details that are often missed.

For more information, read this review from Applelinks, or see the National Gallery’s page about Love Art.

London-based artist Christian Nold has developed a community project called Bio-Mapping. More than 1,500 volunteers in San Francisco, Greenwich and Stockport have been wired with what Nold calls a Galvanic Skin Response sensor (a lie detector connected to a Global Positioning System). Volunteers then walk around their communities while the devices record their physiological responses. This data is then annotated by participants and visualized in colorful maps, both online and in print. Nord’s next Bio-Mapping project will take place in Tokyo.

How will our perceptions of our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states?

ArtsConnectEd, a joint project between the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center, launched in Beta on May 4, 2009.

The new ArtsConnectEd is completely redesigned as a dynamic and social Web site that empowers teachers, students, and museum educators in the creation and sharing of content and ideas in the process of learning about art.

The new Art Finder offers an intuitive and powerful interface to the combined collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) and Walker Art Center (WAC), encouraging both wide exploration and in-depth research.  Users can browse over 90,000 works of art, watch and listen to more than 1,000 video and audio records, and read thousands of articles and object labels.  All of these resources can be collected and arranged as interactive presentations for personal or classroom use, which can in turn be published for others to use.  ArtsConnectEd also allows users to enhance their presentations with video and photos from services such as Flickr, YouTube, and the new ArtBabble video site.

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James Z. Wang, associate professor of information sciences and technology, is one of the principal researchers on the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine (ACQUINE), a system that judges the aesthetic quality of digital images. Wang said this tool is a significant first step in recognizing human emotional reaction to visual stimulus.

ACQUINE, which has been in development since 2005 and was launched in April 2009, can be found online at http://acquine.alipr.com. Users can upload their own images for rating or test the system by providing a link to any image online. The system provides an aesthetic rating within seconds. more…