Author: bridgetm

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News VRC

Open Access PDF Edition of Digital Humanities (2012)

In November 2012 the MIT press published Digital_Humanities, and recently, an open access PDF of the publication was made freely available online as a PDF, which you can read on your computer or e-reader. If your research is taking you in the direction of digital humanities techniques or if you’re considering future projects, this book is a great resource on the state of the field:

Digital_Humanities is a compact, game-changing report on the state of contemporary knowledge production. Answering the question, “What is digital humanities?,” it provides an in-depth examination of an emerging field. This collaboratively authored and visually compelling volume explores methodologies and techniques unfamiliar to traditional modes of humanistic inquiry–including geospatial analysis, data mining, corpus linguistics, visualization, and simulation–to show their relevance for contemporary culture.

Included are chapters on the basics, on emerging methods and genres, and on the social life of the digital humanities, along with “case studies,” “provocations,” and “advisories.” These persuasively crafted interventions offer a descriptive toolkit for anyone involved in the design, production, oversight, and review of digital projects. The authors argue that the digital humanities offers a revitalization of the liberal arts tradition in the electronically inflected, design-driven, multimedia language of the twenty-first century.

Written by five leading practitioner-theorists whose varied backgrounds embody the intellectual and creative diversity of the field, Digital_Humanities is a vision statement for the future, an invitation to engage, and a critical tool for understanding the shape of new scholarship.

For more information, visit the MIT Press or click here to download the PDF—for free! You can also stop by the VRC—we have a copy of the PDF on our iPad.

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Images on the Web Museums VRC

JMW Turner Resources at the Tate

The Tate has two in-depth online resources focused on the career of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851). Turner Worldwide is a project to provide the most comprehensive online catalog of works by Turner, including works that are owned by the Tate as well as nearly 2,500 works by Turner that are in other collections around the world.

 

 

J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Watercolors is a thematic module that presents a catalog of Turner’s works on paper, organized chronologically and by subject. “Entries on the groupings include commentaries, exhibition and publication histories, and information about the media and materials used.” The sketchbooks included have been digitized in their entirety.

For more information, visit the Tate’s page on J.M.W. Turner.

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Images on the Web Photography

LIFE photo archive hosted in Google Images

Millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive are available via Google Images, only a small number of which have been published. Eventually the project will include about 10 million images. You can search specifically in the LIFE search portal, or you can add “source:life” to any Google image search to return only images from the LIFE photo archive.

The archive includes documentary photography by many well-known photographers working in the magazine industry during the hey day of photojournalism, including Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt,

The very first cover of LIFE magazine was a photograph taken by Margaret Bourke-White of Fort Peck in Montana. The issue was published on November 23, 1936. Images from the LIFE photo archive are for personal, non-commercial use only.

For more information, visit the LIFE photo archive digital collection hosted by Google Images.

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VRC

Image Copyright and Google Books

The issue of image copyright and the Google Books project remains an ongoing concern for many photographers, as their copyright images may be digitized and made available through Google Books without their permission. The NPPA and several other plaintiffs are bringing a suit against Google Book Search, arguing:

Google’s acts have caused, and unless restrained, will continue to cause irreparable injuries to Lead Plaintiffs and the Class members through: continued copyright infringement and/or the effectuation of new and further infringements of the Visual Works contained in Books and Periodicals; diminution of the value and ability to license and sell their Visual Works; lost profits and/or opportunities; and damage to their goodwill and reputation.

Plaintiffs include the American Society of Media Photographers, Graphic Artists Guild, Picture Archive Council of America, North American Nature Photography Association, Professional Photographers of America, American Photographic Artists, and several individual photographers.

Via PetaPixel and NPPA

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American Museums

James McNeill Whistler Papers Now Available Digitally

The James McNeill Whistler collection (1863–1906, ca. 1940) at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art is now available online, having been digitized in its entirety in 2012.

The 307 images online include various documents pertaining to the career of Whistler, who was born in the US but worked in London. There are:

39 items from Whistler to various recipients, including 25 letters, 9 telegraphs, 3 invitations, one thank you card and a postcard. The collection also contains 4 letters from others, 7 catalogs of Whistler exhibitions, a note from the back of Whistler’s painting The Beach at Selsey Bill, and a 1906 copy of Wilde v. Whistler: being an acromonious correspondence on art between Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler, a pamphlet containing letters originally published in London newspapers between 1885 and 1890.

Several of the items in the collection are signed with Whistler’s butterfly mark. To view digital images from the archive, or to find out more, visit the James McNeill Whistler Collection.

Image source: James McNeill Whistler collection, 1863-1906, circa 1940. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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VRC

Bielstein’s Permissions, A Survival Guide

Susan M. Bielstein, the executive editor for art, architecture, classical studies, and film at the University of Chicago Press, wrote Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property (2006), which explores issues related to obtaining permissions and licenses to publish visual images. This useful and interesting book describes the process of obtaining permission to publish images in academic texts, using a variety of examples and includes sample letters for requesting permission.

It is available in the University Library in hard copy and also as an e-book (click here for the proxy link to the e-book).

For more information on obtaining permission to publish images, please refer to our page on Copyright Lenient Images for Academic Publishing, which has a section for general resources and guides.

For more information about the book, visit the University of Chicago Press.

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Photography

Treasures of the Public Domain—Old Photo Books

The photography blog PetaPixel recently posted about photography books in the public domain that have been included in Project Gutenberg digital library. Of the 37 books to be fully digitized, perhaps the most exciting is the inclusion of William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, published in 1844. The book details his calotype process and includes 24 images of finished calotype prints with text describing the image’s creation and significance.

Via PetaPixel

For more information, visit Project Gutenberg.

 

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VRC

DPLA Launched Today

The Digital Public Library of America launched today, and currently features 10,000 images from ARTstor, maps and images from the David Rumsey collection, digitized materials (text and images) from several repositories in the United States, including the New York Public Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Smithsonian Institution to name just a few.  More content and partners are expected to be added as the digital library grows (and one notable missing repository is the Library of Congress). The three-fold mission of the Digital Public Library of America is to serve as:

1. A portal that delivers students, teachers, scholars, and the public to incredible resources, wherever they may be in America. Far more than a search engine, the portal provides innovative ways to search and scan through the united collection of millions of items, including by timeline, map, format, and topic.

2. A platform that allows new and transformative uses of our digitized cultural heritage. With an application programming interface (API) and maximally open data, the DPLA can be used by software developers, researchers, and others to create novel environments for learning, tools for discovery, and engaging apps.

3. An advocate for a strong public option in the twenty-first century. For most of American history, the ability to access materials for free through public libraries has been a central part of our culture, producing generations of avid readers and a knowledgeable, engaged citizenry. The DPLA will work, along with like-minded organizations and individuals, to ensure that this critical, open intellectual landscape remains vibrant and broad in the face of increasingly restrictive digital options. The DPLA will seek to multiply openly accessible materials to strengthen the public option that libraries represent in their communities.

In addition to robust search and browse—format, place, and date—functions, the DPLA also has online exhibitions of curated materials that present a variety of cultural topics. You can sign up for a free account to create lists, save items, and save searches.

For more information, check out the DPLA! You may also be interested in checking out similar content aggregating projects on the web, including the World Digital Library and Europeana.

Categories
Images on the Web Medieval

Index of Christian Art & Image Resources

Princeton University’s Index of Christian Art recently added a new collection to its Additional Resources section, an image collection called “The Lois Drewer Calendar of Saints in Byzantine Manuscripts and Frescos.”

This collection joins 12 others that include a variety of topics and media, including manuscripts, decorative arts, and paintings.

For more information, visit the Index of Christian Art and their Additional Resources.

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Image Quality Images on the Web Museums

George Eastman House Joins Google Art Project

Founded in 1949, the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY is the world’s oldest museum of photography and recently announced that it will be the first photography museum to join the Google Art Project:

So far, 50 high-resolution images from their collection—encompassing the birth of photography to the late 20th century—have been added to the Google Art Project website with zooming capabilities and robust cataloging information, and much of the object data was previously unavailable online. More photographs will eventually be added, and the GEH is also partnering with Google Maps Street View to provide 360º views of their galleries and grounds.

For more information, visit the George Eastman House in Google Art Project or read the GEH Press Release.

Via PetaPixel