Categories
Innovative Technology Medieval Presentation

The Book of Kells for iPad

The Book of Kells was released as an iPad app last Friday, November 16. The app contains all 680 surviving pages of the manuscript as well as other special features and content. It is intended to replace previous electronic reproductions of the manuscript which had been released on DVD-ROM and CD-ROM.

The app features the entire manuscript in high resolution, with 21 pages viewable at up to 6 times their actual size and categories of decorative themes that users can browse through including letters, animals, and other symbols.

You can also stop by the VRC anytime to check out the “eBook of Kells” app! Best of all, the app can be projected from the iPad for use in classrooms and presentations.

For more information, view the Book of Kells website or the iTunes app store.

[Images: The Book of Kells, folio 7v and 8r, and an image group of initial letters for the letter “A”.]

 

Categories
Innovative Technology

Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market

The online art journal Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide recently featured a new digital humanities research project that focuses on London’s art market from 1850–1914. The researchers aim to document the rise and spread of commercial galleries across the city by aggregating data from a variety of sources including galleries, exhibition societies, artists’ addresses, and retail spaces. The data was then added to a map of Victorian London—users can turn data on or off depending on their research, including moving chronologically through time.

Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich describe the project and offer their own conclusions based on their research in Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, and the London Gallery Market website with their maps and data is freely available.

Via Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide and London Gallery Market

Image: Pamela Fletcher and David Israel, London Gallery Project, 2007, revised 2012.

Categories
Color Innovative Technology

Visualizing Ambient Music with the Scape iPad App

Need a relaxing, ambient break from your studies? Check out Brian Eno’s latest invention, the Scape app for iPad:

[The Scape app] lets users pull together a variety of shapes, backgrounds, and color schemes – each with its own corresponding musical cues —to create their own visual and sonic landscape. There are no proxies to any sort of traditional music creation tools; everything is based on the abstract imagery and the sounds each visual creates.

The app is $5.99 in the iTunes store. Click here for a video demonstration.

Categories
ARTstor Images on the Web Luna

The Renaissance Society Archive Now Available in ARTstor

Last summer we announced that the Renaissance Society Archive was made publicly available through LUNA, and now we are pleased to announce that as of this week, it is now available in ARTstor as well.

ARTstor and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago are sharing nearly 2,400 images of contemporary art and exhibition installation views in the Digital Library. This collection features painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance, and multi-media work by seminal contemporary artists who exhibited at the Renaissance Society, including Nancy Spero, Raymond Pettibon, Francis Alÿs, Eva Hesse, Kerry James Marshall, Shahzia Sikander, and others.

From its opening in 1915, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago has been a leading space for innovative contemporary art and programming, exhibiting important and challenging work by leading contemporary artists, often early in their careers, before they are shown in major museums and galleries.

You can view the collection in ARTstor or LUNA, and click here for more information on the ARTstor collection or about the Renaissance Society generally.

Via ARTstor Blog

Above image: Thomas Struth. Hörder Brückenstrasse, Dortmund, 1985. Exhibited at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

 

Categories
ARTstor

Importing ARTstor Citations into EndNote

Did you know that you can export citations from ARTstor and import then into EndNote’s desktop citation management software? You can!

If you don’t already have EndNote desktop, you can download a trial license or purchase it through University of Chicago’s IT Services Solution Center at a discounted prince.

After you’ve installed EndNote and created a new citation library, you’ll need to download the ARTstor filter from  in order to install it in EndNote. Once the filter is installed, open the image group that you’d like to cite, and then go to Tools > Save citations for image group.

Next, go to Tools > View and Export Citations. Under Export Options, select “Directly Export Citations into EndNote.” At this point, you can choose to export all of the citations from the image group or make a selection. Click Go.

A small window will open asking whether you would like to save or open the file. Click Open. This will launch EndNote.

EndNote will ask if you want to save the citations to an existing library or create a new one. Select your choice. Another window will open, asking you to choose a filter—select the ARTstor filter you just installed so that the metadata from ARTstor will fall into the right fields in EndNote’s program. Your EndNote library will open with the newly imported citations.

You can add thumbnail images to EndNote records: After you’ve exported images from ARTstor, open a citation record, and click on the symbol for Charts to upload the image file. (If you attach the image file to the PDF section of the record, the file will be saved with the record but no thumbnail will appear).

For more information, visit the ARTstor page on Citing Images. If we can help with anything, or if you have any questions about managing image citations, please don’t hesitate to contact the VRC!

Categories
Luna Scheduled Maintenance Tech Support VRC

LUNA Maintenance, November 5th

LUNA is currently undergoing maintenance. Access to the digital collections may be intermittent. If you have trouble connecting, please consider ARTstor for your image needs this afternoon.

We will update this page when maintenance has completed. Thank you for your patience.

—

Note: LUNA maintenance is over and access has returned to normal. Thank you.

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology VRC

BnF Launches new Gallica iPad App

The Bibliothéque Nationale de France recently released an iPad app for their digital library Gallica. The app, also called Gallica, contains nearly 2 million freely available items from the BnF, including books, journals, manuscripts, photographs, prints, posters, cards, and music scores among many others.

The app allows you to search or browse through all digitized material available through the BnF, and each document can be viewed in its entirety. You can create a favorites list, view the full bibliographic record, download entire documents or individual pages, email links, or share the object on social media outlets including Facebook and Twitter.

You can download the app here, or stop by the VRC to check it out on our iPad!

Categories
Image Quality Images on the Web Museums News

Rijksmuseum’s Collection Available Online Through RijksStudio

Today, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdamn is launching RijksStudio, a digital collection of 125,000 works in the collection. We posted about the first installment about a year ago, and now they’ve fully unveiled their impressive new image platform.

All works in the RijksStudio are available for users to download for personal use as a high-quality jpeg image file. (Using images for professional and commercial uses is possible, but requires filling out a form to obtain permission from the museum). Depending on the type of use, print, and format, images can be downloaded either free or charge or for a fee.

 

In addition to browsing and searching the collection, you can create image groups or explore the image groups of other users. In depth content such as context about art movements, artists’ biographies, and other historical events is available when browsing through facets or when viewing an individual work. Images can be shared on various public media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Pintrest. You can also easily order reproductions of the images.

The image records for objects in the collection contain an absolute wealth of information, including basic object data, exhibition histories, provenance, related artworks, copyright status, and a section called “Documentation,” which serves as a bibliography of the object with links to published references of the work including scholarly articles, monographs, and exhibition catalogs. When online content is available, the object data includes links—for example, links to JSTOR articles.

You can create an account using your email address or log in through your Facebook account. For more information or to start exploring, click here.

Via ArtDaily

Categories
Images on the Web

Blast From the Past: Hilarious Halloween Costumes

Happy Halloween! Visual News has posted some hilarious vintage photographs of amazing Halloween costumes—enjoy!

 

Via Visual News

Categories
Image Quality Images on the Web Innovative Technology

HINT.FM’s The Art of Reproduction

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of the information visualization duo HINT.FM have looked at the problems of inconsistency in digital reproductions of fine art images.  Noticing how multiple reproductions of the same work of art could vary wildly in terms of quality, color, texture, and cropping, they started their project “The Art of Reproduction“:

For a set of famous artworks, we downloaded all the plausible copies we could find. Then we wrote software to reconstruct each artwork as a mosaic, a patchwork quilt where each patch comes from an individual copy.

The resulting compositions (which explore paintings, photographs, drawings, and detailed sections) visually demonstrate the discontinuities of the individual files, creating what HINT.FM calls “a tapestry of beautiful half-truths”. To view all the reproduction-compositions they created, click here.

And don’t forget—if you ever have any trouble finding, creating, or displaying the most accurate images possible, don’t hesitate to contact the VRC!

via HINT.FM