Assistant Director, Visual Resources Collection, University of Chicago
THATCamp Organizer
Carl Pyrdum of Got Medieval (with a little help from Mario) makes a clever argument for the illustration of gravity in the margins of medieval manuscripts:
In order to keep the man and his goat in the middle from falling right on through the bottom of the page, the artist draws in little patches of ground beneath them. Mario, no stranger to platforms that hang in the air as if bolted to the background, would feel right at home with this arrangement.
See the original blog post here.
On Thursday, May 31, 2012 the Getty Research Institute will launch the Getty Research Portal, an unprecedented resource that will provide universal access to digitized texts in the field of art and architectural history.
The Getty Research Portal is a free online search gateway that aggregates descriptive metadata of digitized art history texts, with links to fully digitized copies that are free to download. Art historians, curators, students, or anyone who is culturally curious can unearth these valuable sources of research without traveling from place to place to browse the stacks of the world’s art libraries. There will be no restrictions to use the Getty Research Portal; all anyone needs is access to the internet.
In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Chicago artist Theaster Gates is featured in a discussion of “shows that are changing the art world.”
Visit Theaster Gates’ website, and read more about his projects utilizing slide donations from the UofC Visual Resources Center here.
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland has donated more than 19,000 freely-licensed images of artworks to Wikimedia Commons. The Walters’ collection includes ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art and Old Master and 19th-century paintings. The images and their associated information will join [a] collection of more than 12 million freely usable media files, which serves as the repository for the 285 language editions of Wikipedia.
The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University shares its digital archive of early American images with LUNA Commons. With over 7,000 images, this collection includes:
graphic representations of the colonial Americas, from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego, drawn entirely from primary sources printed or created between 1492 and ca. 1825.
LUNA Commons collections are contributed by partnering institutions from around the world. Please contact the VRC for a LUNA tutorial.
Pinterest isn’t just for bookmarking your home decorating inspirations and favorite recipes. It’s an online “pinboard” that allows users to organize and share images, video, and other web-based information, and could be used as an organizational tool for research.
How it works: once you’ve requested and signed up for an account, you can create various boards for organizing your pins. Boards act a bit like folders, because they keep images and sites together. Boards could be based on themes, research interests, current projects, and so on.
Once you’ve created a board or two, start pinning! Make sure to include the link to the original source, both for your own reference and for copyright reasons. Keep in mind that all boards on Pinterest are currently public. See Pinterest’s copyright page for more information.
While Pinterest is great for visually organizing web-based research and fostering ideas, it does not automatically capture sufficient citation information and should be used in conjunction with a robust citation management tool like Zotero. For more information about citation management tools, visit Regenstein’s Endnote, Zotero, and RefWorks spring quarter office hours on Mondays at 3pm at the TECHB@R.
[The College Art Association] has received a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support the next ARTspace, taking place during the 101st Annual Conference in New York, February 13–16, 2013.
The grant, which is the NEA’s fourth consecutive award to CAA for ARTspace programming, will help fund, among other things, ARTexchange, a popular open-portfolio event for artists, as well as [Meta] Mentors programming, which has covered topics such as do-it-yourself curatorial and exhibition practices, international networks for artists, and assistance with grants, taxes, and promotion.
Via CAA News.
More than 16,000 images of architecture, landscape design, and the built environment from the Society of Architectural Historians’ (SAH) SAHARA project are now available in the ARTstor Digital Library. SAHARA (Society of Architectural Historians Architecture Resources Archive) is a community-built archive of digital images for teaching and research in the field of architectural history.
View the collection here. Via the ARTstor Blog.
You may have heard a lot lately about Instagram, but it’s not the only photo manipulation application out there. PCMag.com recently wrote about 10 Awesome Alternatives to Instagram:
Instagram isn’t the only app out there that can rewind your photos 40 years; there’s a slew of apps for both iPhone and Android that can do the same things—and, in some cases, even more. Many of the apps even work in tandem with Instagram, offering an arsenal of filters and effects for your photo-editing pleasure, and then allow you to export your photo to share on Instagram. Though not all of the apps are free, they’re definitely worth the price of your morning coffee.
Via iLibrarian.
Michelle Caswell of the South Asian American Digital Archive provides a helpful description of community-based archives:
We continue to see SAADA as part of a growing movement of independent grassroots efforts emerging from within communities to collect, preserve, and make accessible records documenting their own histories outside of mainstream archival institutions. These community-based archives serve as an alternative venue for communities to make collective decisions about what is of enduring value to them, to shape collective memory of their own pasts, and to control the means through which stories about their past are constructed.