Category: VRC

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Storymap: A New Free Mapping Tool from Knightlab

StoryMapJS is a free tool created by Northwestern University’s Knightlab, which aimes to make technology that promotes quality storytelling on the Internet. Storymap allows you to highlight locations of a series of events, like this example of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Works of Art. It also uses features like Gigapixel to tag points on an existing images like this example of The Garden of Earthly Delights or SnapMap to instantly create a map through your Instagram feed.  Try this open source user friendly tool for plotting your next project!

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The Robert Sengstacke Photography Archive Now Available in LUNA

The VRC is excited to announce its new publicly available LUNA collection, Images of Black Chicago: The Robert Sengstacke Photography Archive.  Born in Chicago on May 29, 1943, Robert “Bobby” Sengstacke is one of the city’s most prolific documentary photographers who is best known for capturing the African American experience.  Having grown up in the newspaper business (he is the grand-nephew of Robert Sengstacke Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender), Sengstacke was able to learn from established African American photographers at a young age and had unique access to important events and people.  With the help of Art History Professor Rebecca Zorach, the VRC has scanned over 3,000 negatives featuring the artistic community and street life of Chicago’s South Side in the late 1960’s. To obtain high resolution images and permission contact Robert A. Sengstacke (robert.sengstacke@gmail.com or 773-744-7487).

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Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is an organization dedicated to preserving the art, archive, and legacy of the American artist Robert Rauschenberg. Considered one of the most important artists of the latter 20th century, Rauschenberg created new forms of art-making, often combining elements of painting, sculpture, photography, and printmaking into his work.
The foundation’s website provides a wealth of information about the artist, including extensive biographical entries, digitized archival material, and hundreds of high-quality images of his work. Additionally, the foundation provides grants, residencies, and artwork for museums and galleries.

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Flickr Content in LUNA

Did you know it’s possible to search through Flickr content and add it to your Luna Media Groups and include it in the PowerPoint files you export?

After logging in to Luna, click the Explore menu and then choose External content. You can search by a keyword or a Flickr username. This is especially useful for photographs of architectural sites or popular museum installations.

Hover over the upper right corner of an image to add it to your media group. In order to see data about the image, you’ll have to click the Go To Source link. The quality of data varies widely in Flickr because it depends on what the photographer included.

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Mackintosh Architecture: Context, Making, and Meaning

Recently, the University of Glasgow announced the launch of a new website cataloging all known architectural projects of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Scottish architect, designer, and painter.  Additionally, “the site also provides entries for projects by the practice, John Honeyman & Keppie / Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh during the Mackintosh years 1889–1913; images and data from the office record books; a catalogue raisonné of over 1200 drawings by Mackintosh and the practice; analytical and contextual essays; biographies of over 400 clients, colleagues, contractors and suppliers; timeline; glossary; and bibliography.”

For anyone doing research on Mackintosh, this site is a treasure trove of digitized archival documents, photographs, and even job books kept by the firm founded by Honeyman. There are also essays on Mackintosh, an interactive map related to his work, a glossary, and very thorough bibliography.

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New VRC Digital Camera Lending Program

Looking for a digital camera to use on campus? The VRC will now be lending its Canon Rebel T1i to Art History students and faculty! The camera can be checked out for single day on-campus use and a brief orientation will be given to first-timers. To make a reservation, please contact visualresources@uchicago.edu.

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Photoshop Actions

Are you spending too much time with repetitive tasks in Photoshop? Photoshop actions allows you to record a process and save that information as an action which you can then use for other tasks down the road. Not only that, you can edit actions after the fact and customize them to suit your needs.

While you can make an unlimited amount of actions, including color correction, below is an example of how to resize images ideal for Powerpoint. Take some time to plan the steps of the actions before recording.

1. Select “New Action” from the bottom right of the Actions window. Title the action and click “Record.”

 

2. To resize the image, go to the Image menu and select Image Size. Change the resolution to 150dpi.

 

3. Now SAVE AS a JPEG to a specific location on your computer.

4. Finally, click the “Stop” button at the bottom left of the Actions window. You can now use this action on individual images by pressing the “Play” button or Batch Process an entire folder.

 

 

 

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The Robert Frank Collection Online at the National Gallery of Art

The Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art is the largest repository of materials related to renowned photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. Spanning Frank’s career from 1937 to 2005, the collection includes vintage and later prints, contact sheets, work prints, negatives, three bound books of original photographs, technical material, and various papers, books, and recordings.

For a complete account of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection, see Robert Frank photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection. The spreadsheet lists subjects photographed by Frank, in chronological order, along with the corresponding number of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection and the accession number of each object.

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The Classicizing Chicago Project

The Classicizing Chicago Project from Northwestern University brings together several different digital collections and scholarly essays about Classical antiquity and its pervasiveness throughout the city of Chicago. The site currently contains two open-access, searchable collections. The Bosher Collection is a searchable digital database of performances of Greek and Roman drama on Chicago stages dating back to 1840. The Atlas is a digital archive that includes illustrated essays with audio, video, and walking tours currently in development. Both collections add to the project’s focus on the ways in which “the Greek and Roman past permeate Chicago and its environs in both familiar and surprising ways.”

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Saving Images in LUNA

For Saving Single Images in LUNA:

  • Once you find an image you want to save, click on the thumbnail. This will give you a larger-sized image with cataloging information.
  • Double-click on “Export” button in the upper right corner.
  • Select the desired pixel size
    • If the image is going to be displayed in PowerPoint, at least 1500 pixels is sufficient.
  • Save the file to a specified location.
  • Unzip the downloaded file. The image is inside the folder and can be dropped into PowerPoint at this point.

 

To Save a Group of Images in LUNA and Export to PowerPoint:

  • Either open a media group or create a new one. For information on media groups, see LUNA’s video tutorial here.
  • The entire set of images can be downloaded from here by clicking the “Export” button at the top of the media group.
  • Once the media group contains all the images you want, in the order you want, click on the “Export to PowerPoint” button.
  • This will bundle the set, open PowerPoint, and populate a new slideshow with both images and cataloging data.

 

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