Author: arybin

Assistant Director, Visual Resources Collection, University of Chicago
THATCamp Organizer

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology Photography

See Historical Photographs of Your Neighborhood with WhatWasThere

WhatWasThere is a project based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which combines GIS data with historic photographs, including many of architecture. Photographs are linked to their location of origin on maps, allowing visitors to the website (or users of the free mobile app) to take a virtual historic tour through cities and neighborhoods. Users may also contribute their own photographs.

The premise is simple: provide a platform where anyone can easily upload a photograph with two straightforward tags to provide context: Location and Year. If enough people upload enough photographs in enough places, together we will weave together a photographic history of the world (or at least any place covered by Google Maps). So wherever you are in the world, take a moment to upload a photograph and contribute to history!

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary Museums

Interactive Tour of the Barnes Foundation

The New York Times provides an interactive tour of the old Barnes Foundation museum, which has since closed and will reopen in Philadelphia next year. Click on any painting outlined in white for more information, and click and drag your cursor to move throughout each room.

The Barnes Foundation, an extraordinary collection of art amassed by Albert C. Barnes, has been one of America’s strangest art museums from the day its doors opened in 1925. Barnes’s unique juxtapositions of paintings and objects were intended to help the viewer learn to look closely at art.

 

Categories
Exhibitions Modern - Contemporary Museums

The Met’s “Opportunity on Madison”

Last week The New York Times published an opinion piece titled “Opportunity on Madison,” or What the Met Should Do When It Moves into The Whitney. The author discusses The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent lease of The Whitney Museum’s Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue (to be vacated by The Whitney in 2015) and the Met’s decision to display collections of modern and contemporary art there.

I love the 1966 Breuer design. With its trapezoidal windows and stepped-back facade, it’s what the Guggenheim isn’t: starchitecture with the right amount of ego, meaning that it works for art. Almost everything looks good in it. And the Met’s residency, contracted to last at least eight years, seems like a great idea on paper. The Whitney Museum of American Art gets to keep its celebrated building, and the Met, which can never show more than a small fraction of its encyclopedic collection, gets some desperately needed space.

But the Met’s use of that space primarily for new art would be a big mistake.

What do you think? Should The Met utilize the space to house curated shows that include art from many eras, as the author suggests, or for contemporary and modern art, or something else?

Categories
Innovative Technology Museums

Connections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Connections invites its diverse staff to offer their personal perspectives on works of art in the Museum’s vast collection. Their voices range from the authoritative to the highly subjective, and touch upon any number of themes and concepts.

Connections is a year-long series comprising of 100 episodes, and inspires fresh ways to approach art. Throughout 2011, please join us on Wednesdays for weekly releases.

Categories
Images on the Web Islamic Museums

Islamic Manuscripts of the Walters Art Museum

With the help of a Preservation and Access Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and with additional funding from an anonymous donor, the Walters has completed its program to create digital surrogates of its collection of Islamic manuscripts and single leaves. Images are free for any noncommercial use, provided you follow the terms of the Creative Commons license specified by the museum.

Images of the manuscript are available for download from Flickr, including high-resolution images. Full manuscript PDFs (including data) are also available on the Walters website (see the above example here).

Categories
Exhibitions Images on the Web Luna Modern - Contemporary Museums

Renaissance Society Archive in LUNA

The Renaissance Society Archive is now available to the public in LUNA. In addition to images of individual works, the collection includes installation views of recent and historical exhibitions.

Above image: Apocalypse Ballet by Mai-Thu Perret, installation view. Part of the exhibition “And every woman will be a walking synthesis of the universe” from 2006.

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology

Google Adds Reverse Image Search

Did you know? You can now drag image files from your computer into the Google Image search bar to perform an image-based search. Like Tineye, this ability to do a reverse search for images may help users connect images lacking data with information on the Internet. Google will also tell you the pixel dimensions of your image and link to alternate sizes, if available.

Categories
Images on the Web

South Asian American Digital Archive Featured on Asia Pacific Forum

Samip Mallick, President of the Board of Directors of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) and Director of the Ranganathan Center for Digital Information was recently interviewed on WBAI New York’s Asia Pacific Forum. SAADA is a resource that is free and available to the public. Mallick discussed the archive’s efforts to document and preserve the history of South Asian Americans, the vision behind the archive, and some stories behind the collections. An MP3 of the interview is available.

 

 

 

Categories
Innovative Technology

Possible Uses for Google+ in the Classroom

A recent blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the differences between social networking sites Facebook and Google+, and some of the potential uses for Google+ in the classroom:

Facebook does allow some selective sharing, but doing so is difficult to comprehend. As a result, many professors have decided to reserve Facebook for personal communications rather than use it for teaching and research… In Google Plus, users can assign each new contact to a “circle” and can create as many circles as they like. Each time they post an update, they can easily select which circles get to see it.

See also an article from journalism professor Jeremy Littau on “Why Lehigh (and every other) University needs to be on Gplus. Now.” His explanation includes a plan to hold virtual office hours using the Google+ Hangout feature.

 

 

Categories
Images on the Web Renaissance - Baroque

Microscopic Study of the Ghent Altarpiece

A new website allows microscopic study of Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece:

In 2010, Van Eyck’s renowned Ghent Altarpiece was subjected to an urgent conservation treatment within the Villa Chapel in St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent. To allow this work, the altarpiece was temporarily dismantled, which in turn made it possible to undertake a technical documentation campaign, funded by the Getty Foundation. This project generated a wealth of high-definition digital images that will be integrally placed on the internet, which will allow anyone to study these paintings in microscopic magnification, and to peek under the paint surfaces by means of Infrared reflectograms (IRRs) and X-radiographs.

The first part of this project is available now, in full resolution. Users are able to study the underdrawings of any two panels side by side.

Via Historians of Netherlandish Art.

Note: In order to see images of the Ghent Altarpiece linked above in LUNA, you must be a member of the UChicago community.