A set of digitized avant-garde book covers is available on Flickr. The collection features early-twentieth century typography, including Latin American books and artist Joaquín Torres Garcia. There are also subsets featuring the Futurists and Dutch and Russian books.
Newberry Digital Exhibitions showcases cataloged, digitized materials that have been featured in past Newberry exhibitions. It recreates these exhibitions in digital form so that the information continues to be accessible even though the works have left the physical gallery space.
The newest digitized exhibitions include Illuminated Manuscripts and Printed Books: French Renaissance Gems of the Newberry Library and French Canadians in the Midwest.
The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center will close at 2pm on Friday, May 27th and remain closed through Monday, May 30th in observance of Memorial Day. Have a great long weekend!
Photograph via the National Archives and Records Administration Flickr Photoset Documerica.
Last week CLAROS launched its first public web-based search interface, allowing users to discover digital resources from multiple collections of international art at once. Emphasis is placed on the art of Ancient Greece and Rome.
Based at the e-Research Centre in Oxford, CLAROS is an international research collaboration to allow simultaneous searching of major collections of digital material about archaeology and art in university research institutes and museums. It contains material from a wide range of data partners, including the Beazley Archive, various digital archives in the Ashmolean Museum, the Arachne archive, the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, and the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, recording over 2 million objects, places, photographs, and people.
CLAROS provides keyword searching as well as browsing based on category, place, period, text and collection. It also performs reverse image searches of pottery and sculpture. This means users can upload an image or point to an image on the web and CLAROS will try to match it with those in the collections.
Works from the 16th and 17th centuries by Kepler, Galileo and Nostradamus have been digitally reformatted and are available in color via Google Books. Traditionally, such manuscripts have been scanned in black-and-white; Google’s color scans allow for a more accurate experience of the originals.
Some of the foundational texts now available in color include Nostradamus’ Prognostication nouvelle et prediction portenteuse (1554), Johannes Kepler’s Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae from 1635, and Galileo’s Systema cosmicum from 1641. All texts can be viewed online, or downloaded as a PDF (although the PDF’s lack color)…
Via Open Culture.
The New York Public Library has released the first in a series of free iPad applications which will highlight various aspects of the library’s collections and services. The series is called Biblion: The Boundless Library and the first app showcases the library’s 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair holdings. As the Apple iTunes description of Biblion: World’s Fair states:
In this free app you will hold documents, images, films, audio, and essays directly from the collections right in your hands.
Via INFOdocket.
A new open access policy at Yale has made it possible for the University to release more than 250,000 digital images online, freely available to the public through their collective catalog. For public domain material, no license will be required and no restrictions will be placed upon use of the images.
The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration.
Via Yale Office of Public Affairs and Communications.
The International Research Portal is a collaboration of national and other archival institutions with records that pertain to Nazi-Era cultural property. These archival institutions, along with expert national and international organizations, are working together to extend public access to the widely-dispersed records through a single internet portal. The portal will allow families to research their losses, provenance researchers to locate important documentation, and historians to study newly accessible materials on the history of this period.
Via Guardian.
Reed College has made available online a comprehensive guide to the Ara Pacis Augustae.
The Ara Pacis Augustae is a complex masterpiece, with elaborate reliefs including more than a hundred figures and voluminous vegetation filled with the details of nature. It is also a much damaged and reconstructed monument, making it important to distinguish original from later portions and more recent changes. This web site attempts to provide in-depth visual documentation in support of the in-depth scholarly publications that have so enriched our understanding of Augustan art and society.
Information on the website includes models, diagrams and photographs of the Augustan altar, maps and aerial views of the original site, published images, and photographs of the contemporary museum location.
Many of us have heard recent revelations about the kinds of geographic information stored on our mobile devices, including iPhones and iPads. On the lighter side of location tracking, some artists are using this kind of data to create art based on people’s movements and interactions. One such example is Maria Scileppi’s Living Brushstroke project. Her video Anthem includes visualizations from events like Burning Man and the 2010 Chicago Marathon. According to the project’s blog, a Living Brushstroke iPhone app will be available soon.
Via O’Reilly Radar.