The Visual Resources Center’s website, All Things Visual, is now mobile-friendly! Try viewing our site from an iPhone or iPod Touch and you’ll find it’s easy to read and navigate.
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Author: arybin
Assistant Director, Visual Resources Collection, University of Chicago
THATCamp Organizer
Looking for high-quality movie clips online? Try MovieClips, a free website which offers more than 12,000 scenes searchable by actor, title, genre, occasion, action, mood, character, theme, setting, prop, and even dialogue. You can save clips as favorites, add and answer trivia questions related to movie scenes, embed clips on your own website, and share clips with friends via Facebook, Twitter, and more. MovieClips is only available in the US and Canada, and right now clips are available from six major Hollywood studios: 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros.
Currently in beta, MovieClips also welcomes feedback, including suggestions for movies that you’d like to see added to the collection.
Wired.com has lots of updates from CES 2010, the world’s largest consumer electronics convention. CES 2010 took place January 7-10 in Las Vegas. This year’s highlights included a transparent OLED display prototype from Samsung, shown in a video from the conference.
“Through a new collaboration among Islamic-studies scholars, librarians, and curators, Harvard University has cataloged, conserved, and digitized Islamic manuscripts, maps, and published texts from its renowned library and museum collections. The result is a new online collection comprising more than 145,000 digital pages available to Internet users everywhere.”
The collaboration, known as the Islamic Heritage Project, includes materials that date from the 13th to the 20th centuries CE and include various regions, languages, and subjects. More informaton about the scope and content of the project is available here.
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Happy (Turquoise) New Year!
Is the beginning of the quarter making you feel stressed? You might consider a new wall color for the new year. Pantone revealed in a recent press release that turquoise (Pantone 15-5519) is the color of the year for 2010. The reason? According to Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, turquoise “is believed to be a protective talisman, a color of deep compassion and healing, and a color of faith and truth, inspired by water and sky. Through years of color word-association studies, we also find that Turquoise represents an escape to many – taking them to a tropical paradise that is pleasant and inviting, even if only a fantasy.”
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Jenny Holzer Interviewed in the NYT Magazine
An interview with contemporary artist Jenny Holzer in today’s New York Times Magazine, accompanied by photographs of her home, reveals: her supposed Twitter page is not her own, her favorite chore is laundry (“because I succeed at it”), she keeps horses as an inherited hobby even though she doesn’t ride (“they are fuzzy and optimistic”), and she overpacks when traveling.
On that note, happy and safe travels to you during this holiday season.
Above photograph by Flickr user Lord Jim. Work: “Inflamatory Essays” by Jenny Holzer, installed in Los Angeles, Spring 2008, as part of “Women in the City.”
The New York Public Library’s Picture Collection uses a collaborative web-based discussion and presentation tool, VoiceThread, to show images from their collections to the public and to students in classrooms. VoiceThread allows users to make comments on presentations by webcam, computer microphone, text, or telephone. If leaving a comment by computer, users may also draw on an image to illustrate their opinions.
For more information about VoiceThread, click here.
The Smithsonian Institution recently released their Collections Search Center online tool which searches over 2 million records with 265,900 images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other resources from the Smithsonian’s museums, archives and libraries. You can specify that the search return only results with online media. It is also possible to browse by topic, as well as by place, culture, language, and more.
A list of currently available collections is available here, and more collections will be added over time.
Above image: The Gopis Search for Krishna from a Bhagavata Purana, ca. 1780. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
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.
Please note: to view these PowerPoint illustrations at a larger size, click on the images.
To create a simple Art History style PowerPoint 2008 theme, first open a new presentation. The Formatting Palette will appear on the right side; if it does not, click on the “Toolbox” icon from the menu bar. On the Formatting Palette, select Style 4, which is a black background with white text.
To ensure that any subsequent text added to the slide with a text box is formatted correctly (ie, in white font), create a “test” text box by selecting that icon from the menu bar.
Once you have created and tested the text box…
…you’re ready to save the slide theme. Select “Save Theme” from the Formatting Palette.
Select a name for your theme that will be recognizable to you later.
To apply your theme to any future presentation, select the “Slide Themes” tab.
Next, select the “Custom Themes” tab. You will then see your theme saved with the title you assigned. Click on its thumbnail and you’re set!
You can follow the above steps to save other types of Microsoft Office 2008 themes as well. If you have any questions, please contact the VRC.