Category: VRC

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VRC

VRC Instruction Sessions Available

Welcome back to CWAC! Don’t forget this quarter that the VRC is available to you for all of your digital image needs. This includes introductory or refresher sessions about ARTstor and LUNA image databases (which can be tailored to your research projects), orientation to VRC image scanning services and lab equipment, or sessions on managing and citing images for thesis research. We can conduct these sessions in the classroom, in small groups, or individually. Feel free to email us at visualresources@uchicago.edu to set up a session or with any questions.

We hope the quarter is off to a good start!

Above image: Winter at Portland by Allen Tucker (1866-1939), 1907. Image Provider: Metropolitan Museum of Art via ARTstor.

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ARTstor Luna VRC

UofC Collections in ARTstor

Welcome back to campus! During winter quarter 2013, you may notice some differences in available ARTstor image collections. Due to changes in the structure of the ARTstor image hosting program, the University of Chicago will not continue hosting its Visual Resources Center or Archivision Library collections there at this time. Hosted images previously saved to image groups and folders will no longer appear in those places. However, all images from the Visual Resources Center Collection and Archivision Library Base Collection remain active in LUNA. The university’s subscription to the 1-million+ images in ARTstor’s main digital library will continue without interruption.

Please contact the VRC with any questions.

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Ancient Image Quality Images on the Web Innovative Technology Museums VRC

The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls

The Google Cultural Institute and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem collaborated to bring five complete Dead Sea Scrolls online. The new digital library (released Tuesday, December 18), allows users to study and discover the the most ancient biblical manuscripts on earth:

The website gives searchable, fast-loading, high-resolution images of the scrolls, as well as short explanatory videos and background information on the texts and their history. The scroll text is also discoverable via web search. If you search for a phrase from the scrolls, a link to that text within the scroll may surface in your search results. For example, try searching on Google for [And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb Dead Sea Scroll].

English translations of the manuscripts are also available. The Google Cultural Institute is also responsible for the Art Project as well as other digital humanities projects, including Versailles 3D and La France en relief. For the Dead Sea Scrolls project, they used imaging technology originally developed for NASA. The scrolls weren’t discovered until 1947, and they had been in the Qumran caves for two thousand years. ArtDaily reports:

The parchment and papyrus scrolls contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic script, and include several of the earliest-known texts from the Bible, including the oldest surviving copy of the Ten Commandments. The oldest of the documents dates to the third century BC and the most recent to about 70 AD, when Roman troops destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The artefacts are housed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the larger pieces are shown at the dimly lit Shrine of the Book on a rotational basis in order to minimise damage from exposure. When not on show, they are kept in a dark, climate-controlled storeroom in conditions similar to those in the Qumran caves, where the humidity, temperature and darkness preserved the scrolls for two millennia.

For more information, visit the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls.

Via artdaily.org

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Museums VRC

MoMA and the Met Duel over “Canyon”

 

The Rauschenberg painting has been on MoMA’s wish list for over 15 years. As part of a $41 million IRS settlement because of controversy over the painting’s value, which features a stuffed bald eagle protected under two laws, it has found its home under the conditions that Ileana Sonnabend’s name be added to the donors wall, and The Museum devote an entire show to not only the painting, but also Ms. Sonnabend. The family lawyer said, “ What was important was that it would be more of a star at MoMA. It was [on loan] at the Met, and was not featured as a star.”

Read the full NY Times article.

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Photography VRC

Book Signing at After Words Bookstore for Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows

Vivian Maier (1926–2009) moved to Chicago in 1956 and though she worked as a nanny to support herself, she spent her spare time taking photographs and making films. Her work was largely unknown during her lifetime, as the more than 10,000 negatives she made were kept hid:

Maier’s massive body of work would come to light when in 2007 her work was discovered at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest Side. From there, it would eventually impact the world over and change the life of the man who championed her work and brought it to the public eye, John Maloof.

While Maloof and his team were cataloging her work, they maintained an image-heavy website dedicated to her life and work, and the Chicago Cultural Center mounted an exhibition “Finding Vivian Maier: Chicago Street Photographer” (7 January–3 April 2011), which garnered a lot of public interest in Chicago’s “nanny photographer”.

Authors Richard Cahan and Michael Williams released a new book of Vivian Maier’s photographs last month called Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows. In addition to providing context for the artist’s life, the book publishes 275 of her photographs. To celebrate, After-Words New and Used Books in downtown Chicago is hosting a book signing party on Thursday, November 29 at 6:30.

Via Chicagoist

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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!

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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