Author: bridgetm

Categories
Tech Support

New Service: Software Consultations at the TECHB@R

The TECHB@R (located on the first floor of Regenstein Library by the stairs) is now offering free Software Consultations to faculty, staff, and students looking for assistance with a variety of general computing and statistical software, including Photoshop, InDesign, and PowerPoint.

Weekly Hours for TECHB@R Software Consultations:

  • Monday through Thursday: 5–9 pm
  • Friday: 3–5 pm
  • Saturday and Sunday: 12–3 pm

Consultations are available for walk-ins but you can also schedule appointments by emailing itconsult@uchicago.edu.

For more information: Software Consultations and TECHB@R

Categories
VRC

The Effect of Color, Off Book, PBS

 

Off Book is a web-exclusive series from PBS that “explores cutting edge arts and the artists that make it.” Each episode is less than 10-minutes long and discusses a variety of topics pertaining to art, design, and culture such as tattoos, web design, or viral videos.

The Effect of Color is one of their most recent episodes:

Color is one of the fundamental elements of our existence, and defines our world in such deep ways that its effects are nearly imperceptible. It intersects the worlds of art, psychology, culture, and more, creating meaning and influencing behavior every step of the way. Most fascinating are the choices we make, both subconsciously and consciously, to use color to impact each other and reflect our internal states. Whether in the micro-sense with the choice of an article of clothing, or the macro-sense where cultures on the whole embrace color trends at the scale of decades, color is a signifier of our motives and deepest feelings.

 

Categories
News Precolumbian VRC

Tomb of Lady K’abel, Maya Queen, Found in Guatemala

Archaeologists from Washington University in St. Louis have discovered the tomb of Lady K’abel in the royal Maya city of El Perú-Waka’ in northern Petén, Guatemala. Lady K’abel was a seventh-century Maya Holy Snake Lord and is considered one of the great queens of Classic Maya civilization.

Washington University reports:

A small, carved alabaster jar found in the burial chamber caused the archaeologists to conclude the tomb was that of Lady K’abel.

The white jar is carved as a conch shell, with a head and arm of an aged woman emerging from the opening. The depiction of the woman, mature with a lined face and a strand of hair in front of her ear, and four glyphs carved into the jar, point to the jar as belonging to K’abel.

For more information on the excavation and the site of the tomb, check out the news release here, which also contains a link to the full report by the archaeologists on the discovery.

Additionally, Lady K’abel is depicted on Stela 34 of El Perú, located at the Cleveland Art Museum. Her husband, K’inich Bahlam, is depicted on Stela 33.

Front Face of a Stela, 692, Mesoamerica, Southern Lowlands, Maya People. Cleveland Art Museum, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund, 1967.29.

Categories
American Images on the Web Innovative Technology VRC

A Handsome Atlas

 

Interested in information visualization and/or 19th Century American culture?  Explore “A Handsome Atlas,” a recent project by the Brooklyn Brainery, which displays reproductions of the Statistical Atlases of the United States of America from 1870, 1880, and 1890. Although these maps, charts, and graphs were created more than a hundred years ago, they are surprisingly modern in their display of information.

While the images are all available online through the Library of Congress and a long list on the US Census website, A Handsome Atlas provides a much more elegant interface image viewer that allows for easily viewing the contents of each atlas and zooming in on individual plates. Users have the options to filter by countless subjects pertaining to life in the US—including liquor, lumber, and Lutherans among many others—or to filter by specific categories of visualization devices, including pie charts, radar charts, and treemaps.

Users also have the option to view each plate on the Library of Congress website and to freely download image files in high, medium, or low resolution.

Additionally, the 1880 and 1890 Statistical Atlases were undertaken by Henry Gannett, largely considered to be the father of American mapmaking. The David Rumsey Map Collection contains more than 170 government-sponsored maps, charts, and geological surveys by Gannett. Click here to view.

Via Information Aesthetics

Categories
Innovative Technology Museums News

MetPublications Now Online

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently launched a new feature on their website called MetPublications:

MetPublications is a portal to the Met’s comprehensive publishing program. Beginning with nearly 650 titles published from 1964 to the present, this resource will continue to expand and could eventually offer access to nearly all books, Bulletins, and Journals published by the Metropolitan Museum since the Met’s founding in 1870. It will also include online publications.

MetPublications includes a description and table of contents for almost every title, as well as information about the authors, reviews, awards, and links to related Met bibliographies by author, theme, or keyword. Current titles that are in-print may be previewed and fully searched online, with a link to purchase the book. The full contents of almost all other titles may be read online, searched, or downloaded as a PDF, at no cost. Books can be previewed or read and searched through the Google Books program. Many out-of-print books are available for purchase, when rights permit, through print-on-demand capabilities in association with Yale University Press.

Currently, there are  368 titles with full text online, which can be read online in Google Books or downloaded as a PDF.

Categories
Images on the Web VRC

Leo Baeck Institute’s Archive of Jewish Life Now Online

 

Yesterday the New York Times announced, “The Leo Baeck Institute, a New York research library and archive devoted to documenting the history of German-speaking Jewry, has completed the digitization of its entire archive, which will provide free online access to primary-source materials encompassing five centuries of Jewish life in Central Europe.”

The online collection for the Leo Baeck Institute is called DigiBaeck, and is:

a growing treasury of artifacts that document the rich heritage of German-speaking Jewry in the modern era. DigiBaeck provides instant access to materials ranging from rare 16th century renaissance books to memoirs that document the experience of German-Jewish émigrés across the world in the 20th century.

In addition to manuscript material and archival photographs, more than 2,600 art objects have been digitized and are accessible on the website. While there is a lot of material digitally available now, on October 16, the expanded archive will be released online, representing the archive online in its entirety.

Via the New York Times

 

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology VRC

Art.sy: a New Online Art Discovery Tool

The New York Times wrote yesterday of a new start-up called Art.sy, which is digitizing works of fine art to catalog in its database, called the “Art Genome Project”. Their service is similar to Pandora, which mapped a “music genome” in order to encourage user discovery of new songs, or Netflix, which uses algorithms to predict and suggest films and movies a user might like.

Art.sy already has 20,000 images in their database, is partnering with galleries, museums, and other cultural institutions to increase their catalog. In addition to traditional subject, genre, and period/movement based descriptions, Art.sy’s team is also tagging works with categories that their system will use “to make connections that are seemingly from different worlds.” These categories include ideas such as “focus on the social margins,” or “personal histories,” and “private spaces.” The system will also search for images that are most similar in terms of composition and color, providing yet another way to access different images.

For more information, see Art.sy’s blog or visit the Art.sy website, where you can request a login or browse the beta site.

Via New York Times

Categories
Exhibitions Images on the Web Museums Photography VRC

Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop

The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently released a new iPad app, “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop” to accompany a current photography exhibition.

Digital cameras and image-editing software have made photo manipulation easier than ever, but photographers have been doctoring images since the medium was invented. The false “realities” in altered photographs can be either surprising and eye-catching or truly deceptive and misleading.

Faking It is a quiz that asks players to spot which photos are fake and figure out why they were altered. Through fifteen sets of questions accompanied by more than two dozen remarkable images, the Faking It app challenges misconceptions about the history of photo manipulation.

Images in the app range from a heroic portrait of Ulysses S. Grant to a playful portrait of Salvador Dalí, and from New York’s glamorous Empire State Building to Oregon’s sublime Cape Horn.

The app complements the exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (on view October 11, 2012–January 27, 2013).

Categories
News VRC

Visit the VRC & Check out our iPad 2!

 

Welcome back students and faculty! To start the new school year off right, our iPad 2 is now set up in the VRC. We hope you’ll come check it out in CWAC 257.

We’ve installed a lot of great apps about art and images that have been featured on our blog and Facebook page and other programs that are useful for art historians, including Keynote. There’s also quick links to LUNA, Chalk, and ARTstor.

We also installed a great app called Flipboard, which we’ve set to display RSS feeds from other blogs pertaining to art, culture, and museums. Flipboard takes these feeds and displays them like a magazine [see screenshot above], making it easy to catch up on the latest news and research.

There’s also a wireless keyboard to go with the iPad, so you can easily check your email, look up campus events, or catch up on the news.

And, as always, the VRC’s iPad 2 can be reserved to teach and present in CWAC.

We look forward to seeing you!

Categories
Museums Precolumbian

Art Institute of Chicago Lecture: Ritual Mask from Teotihuacan

Curator Richard Townsend brings to life the splendor and pageantry of Teotihuacan, the largest city in the ancient Americas, as he reveals city plans, amazing architectural structures, and powerful ritual objects.

Next Thursday, October 11, the Art Institute of Chicago will present a lecture on Mesoamerican art from Teotihuacan in Fullerton Hall from 6–7 pm. The lecture is free with museum admission—and your UCID functions as your UChicago Arts Pass, providing free admission to the Art Institute of Chicago among other museums and cultural centers.

For more information, view the event page or check out the Art Institute’s collection of Mesoamerican art online.