Assistant Director, Visual Resources Collection, University of Chicago
THATCamp Organizer
A set of digitized avant-garde book covers is available on Flickr. The collection features early-twentieth century typography, including Latin American books and artist Joaquín Torres Garcia. There are also subsets featuring the Futurists and Dutch and Russian books.
Newberry Digital Exhibitions showcases cataloged, digitized materials that have been featured in past Newberry exhibitions. It recreates these exhibitions in digital form so that the information continues to be accessible even though the works have left the physical gallery space.
The newest digitized exhibitions include Illuminated Manuscripts and Printed Books: French Renaissance Gems of the Newberry Library and French Canadians in the Midwest.
The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center will close at 2pm on Friday, May 27th and remain closed through Monday, May 30th in observance of Memorial Day. Have a great long weekend!
Photograph via the National Archives and Records Administration Flickr Photoset Documerica.
Last week CLAROS launched its first public web-based search interface, allowing users to discover digital resources from multiple collections of international art at once. Emphasis is placed on the art of Ancient Greece and Rome.
Based at the e-Research Centre in Oxford, CLAROS is an international research collaboration to allow simultaneous searching of major collections of digital material about archaeology and art in university research institutes and museums. It contains material from a wide range of data partners, including the Beazley Archive, various digital archives in the Ashmolean Museum, the Arachne archive, the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, and the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, recording over 2 million objects, places, photographs, and people.
CLAROS provides keyword searching as well as browsing based on category, place, period, text and collection. It also performs reverse image searches of pottery and sculpture. This means users can upload an image or point to an image on the web and CLAROS will try to match it with those in the collections.
The Soviet Arts Experience is a 16-month-long collaborative showcase of artistic work created under the Politburo of the Soviet Union, from 1917 to 1991. This series of programs includes works of art, dance, concerts, lectures, and classes. Twenty-six of Chicago’s prominent arts institutions will present events through 2012.
A Soviet Arts Experience iPhone app has been created to help navigate the showcase’s many events. It includes embedded Google Maps and is available for free to download through the iTunes store.
Works from the 16th and 17th centuries by Kepler, Galileo and Nostradamus have been digitally reformatted and are available in color via Google Books. Traditionally, such manuscripts have been scanned in black-and-white; Google’s color scans allow for a more accurate experience of the originals.
Some of the foundational texts now available in color include Nostradamus’ Prognostication nouvelle et prediction portenteuse (1554), Johannes Kepler’s Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae from 1635, and Galileo’s Systema cosmicum from 1641. All texts can be viewed online, or downloaded as a PDF (although the PDF’s lack color)…
Via Open Culture.
This week the color photograph celebrates its 150th birthday. On May 17, 1861, Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell and photographer Thomas Sutton (inventor of the SLR camera) shot a photograph of a colored ribbon using red, green, and blue filters.
Via BBC News.
The New York Public Library has released the first in a series of free iPad applications which will highlight various aspects of the library’s collections and services. The series is called Biblion: The Boundless Library and the first app showcases the library’s 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair holdings. As the Apple iTunes description of Biblion: World’s Fair states:
In this free app you will hold documents, images, films, audio, and essays directly from the collections right in your hands.
Via INFOdocket.
A new open access policy at Yale has made it possible for the University to release more than 250,000 digital images online, freely available to the public through their collective catalog. For public domain material, no license will be required and no restrictions will be placed upon use of the images.
The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration.
Via Yale Office of Public Affairs and Communications.
This week PBS aired a new episode of their television program Secrets of the Dead in which producer Steve Talley explores the life-sized terracotta warriors of China:
This clay army of 8,000 including infantry, archers, generals and cavalry was discovered by archaeologists in 1974 after farmers digging a well near the Chinese city of Xian unearthed pieces of clay sculpted in human form.
An amazing archaeological find, the terracotta warriors date back more than two thousand years. But what was the purpose of this army of clay soldiers? Who ordered its construction? How were they created? Secrets of the Dead investigates the story behind China’s Terracotta Warriors and documents their return to former glory for the first time.
The episode is now available online.