Category: VRC

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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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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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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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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.

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ARTstor VRC

ARTstor Upgrade Tuesday April 16, 6 am to 1 pm EST

From ARTstor:

Please be advised that we will be performing an upgrade to the ARTstor Digital Library on Tuesday, April 16th between 6:00 AM and 1:00 PM EST. During this time, users will be able to access the Digital Library but may experience some slowness. This upgrade will eliminate the need for Java in the ARTstor Digital Library and single image downloads will be delivered in Zip files (find out why here).

If you have any difficulty with ARTstor on Tuesday morning, we suggest using LUNA for your image needs. If you are having problems with ARTstor after 1 pm EST, please contact userservices@artstor.org.

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News Photography VRC

Update to Oxford Art Online—Expanded Photography Section

Oxford Art Online dramatically expanded their coverage of photography in April 2014:

This season Grove Art Online is pleased to present a group of more than 60 new and significantly updated articles on the topic of photography, developed in part in response to frequent reader requests for more expansive coverage of the history and practice of photography in Grove. The centerpiece of the project is a group of 16 new and significantly updated articles on key movements and concepts, including important pieces on documentary photography, digital photography, and the worker photography movement. The update also includes a set of 44 new biographies, South African photographer Ernest Cole, female portraitist Zaida Ben-Yosuf, 19th-century critic Francis Wey, and 20th-century curator John Szarkowski. Filling out this season’s update are another 90 photography-related articles with fully updated bibliographies to incorporate the latest research. Many thanks are due to the dedicated and accomplished scholars who contributed to this update, as well as to the institutions and individuals who generously provided over 120 stunning new illustrations to promote understanding of the texts. This new material complements Grove’s existing coverage of photography around the globe, and sets the stage for continued growth in coming years.

For access to Oxford Art Online (University of Chicago affiliates only), click here. To go directly to the newly updated Photography content, click here.

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Modern - Contemporary Museums VRC

post—Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe

post Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe is an interactive platform hosted by the Museum of Modern Art that encourages participation in a wide variety of discussions pertaining to the contemporary art and archives. This began as the public face for MoMA’s research program C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative):

post is a site for encounters between the established and experimental, the historical and emerging, the local and global, the scholarly and artistic. An online journal, archive, exhibition space, and open forum that takes advantage of the nonhierarchical nature of the Internet, post seeks to spark in-depth explorations of the ways in which modernism is being redefined. The site’s contents are intended to build nuanced understandings of the histories that shape the practices of artists and institutions today. As a networked platform, post aims to provide an alternative to the model of a unified art historical

For more information, visit post.

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Exhibitions Museums Renaissance - Baroque VRC

The Getty’s Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance App

The Getty launched an app to go along with its exhibition Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance, which ran from November 2012–February 2013. The app explores 7 objects from the exhibition in depth, including slide shows, animations, X-Ray and UV photographs, and pan and zoom functionality.

For more information, visit the Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance iPad app, or stop by the VRC to check ours out!

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ARTstor Tech Support VRC

ARTstor No Longer Requires Java

Good news for ARTstor image users! ARTstor has eliminated the need for the Java plugin to download images from their digital library. ARTstor writes:

After our update, users who download single image files will receive a zip file that contains a JPEG image and an HTML file with the associated metadata. In addition to removing the need for Java, using zip will allow ARTstor to pursue other feature enhancements, such as additional options for image group downloads.

Mac users should have a problem, but PC users might have to install software to unzip the image folder. ARTstor suggests using 7Zip if you’re one of the affected users. Please feel free to contact the VRC if you’re having any issues downloading images from ARTstor.

Via ARTstor Blog