Category: VRC

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VRC

Roman Ruins iPad App

Historvius (a travel company focused on historic sites) recently launched a new iPad app that explores Roman Ruins.

The app features more than 100 individual Roman sites from around the world, and includes more than 1,500 images, Google Streetviews of select sites, and 3D aerial views. Users can browse the app by site name, country, or a map, but there is no keyword search. The site has curated galleries and collections, so pulling up examples of Roman baths, arenas, or mosaics is easy.

Although the app aims to help travelers, the many high quality images and especially the street and aerial views of sites makes it appealing to those studying Roman art. Stop by the VRC and check out Roman Ruins!

Via Digital Meets Culture

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ARTstor News VRC

ARTstor Mobile’s Flashcard Feature

      

Just in time for finals! You can use image groups in ARTstor to quiz yourself for Image ID tests when you’re using ARTstor on a mobile device. The image groups can be saved in your own personal work folder, or be in an institutional group that your instructor created for you.

After opening the image group, open an image, and click the link below that reads “Switch to Flash Card.” This will allow you to click through the images in the group without providing caption information. In order to bring up the caption information, tap the center of the image. To move back and forth in the image group, use the left and right arrows.

To check out the flashcard feature, navigate to ARTstor Mobile on your device and get studying!

Via ARTstor Blog

 

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VRC

LACMA Releases Online Catalog of Southeast Asian Art

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently released a new online scholarly catalog on Southeast Asian Art. This digital publication is to be the first in a series that LACMA hopes to use to bring catalogs previously only existing in print to the web, where they can be freely available.

The Southeast Asian Art catalog features catalog entries on 34 objects from LACMA’s permanent collection as well as four thematic essays and a glossary. Users can access the content through LACMA’s Reading Room website, or download parts or all of the catalog as a PDF.

Via ArtDaily

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News VRC

VRC Has New Adapter to Project from iPad Mini!

No small deal about it: the VRC now has a new adapter to project from an iPad Mini in CWAC classrooms. The HDMI adapter allows for picture and sound projection.

To reserve this adapter or others, please contact the VRC at visualresources@uchicago.edu.

For more information, please see our page on Classroom Technology.

 

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VRC

The Irving Penn Archives at the Art Institute

The Art Institute of Chicago holds the paper and photographic archives of Irving Penn (1917–2009), a leading photographer of the 20th century. In addition, the Art Institute also has more than 200 fine art prints by Penn, and in Spring 2012 the museum launched a website to unite photographs from the Department of Photography with archival materials from the Irving Penn Archives, housed in the museum’s Ryerson and Burnham Library and Archives.

The website presents access to newly digitized archival materials, much of which was previously not discoverable online, and presents a series of thematic essays along with a host of research resources, including timelines, bibliographies, and more, and robust cataloging information about each fine art print, including inscriptions and publication and exhibition histories.

For more information or to view the website, visit the Irving Penn Archives. Click here for a direct link to the visual content of the website, including fine art prints, digitized material from the photographic archives including test prints and contact sheets, and digitized material from the paper archives including Irving Penn’s notebooks and technical printing information.

 

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Photography VRC

Luminous Lint

Luminous Lint is an expansive photography resource that includes images and text about historic and contemporary photographic practice, as well as artist biographies, styles and movements, thematic content, information about printing techniques and processes, and chronological information about the history of the medium.

The website also features images of artworks as well as artists’ monographs, making it a great starting place to research photographers or photographic movements.

For more information, check out Luminous Lint!

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VRC

Natural History Images from the Biodiversity Heritage Library

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a consortium of libraries that are digitizing materials pertaining to biodiversity within their collections. While the majority of the digital collection contains text and scientific literature, the books and historic journals and albums the BHL is digitizing often contain high quality natural history images.

The BHL is pulling the images from their digital library and hosting them online in Flickr, with minimal metadata in the Flickr record and a link back to the official record in the BHL digital library for a full catalog record. There are more than 1,600 sets of images in the BHL’s Flickr collection, making it a fantastically rich resource for natural history images in the public domain.

For more information, check out the BHL Flickr page!

Image from Flore médicale /. Paris: Imprimerie de C.L.F. Panckoucke, 1828-1832.

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Color Innovative Technology VRC

Adobe Kuler

Adobe Kuler is an iPhone app that allows you to create a themed color palette based on photos taken with an iPhone camera or from imported photos from the web (the app provides you with a Google Images search option, which is convenient). As soon as you show the Kuler app an image, it starts capturing colors from the image and creates a customizable color theme. You can also create themes manually using the color wheel and standard color rules—analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary). The themes are editable, and you can sync them with your Adobe account and the Creative Cloud and can be used for design purposes—it works especially well with Adobe Illustrator.

For more information about the Kuler app, visit the web version‘s color wheel or the app. We have the app installed on the VRC’s iPad, so feel free to come check it out!

The image examples are left: my desk in the VRC and right: Sandy Skoglund’s Revenge of the Goldfish (1981).

Via Wired

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Presentation VRC

Use F4 in PowerPoint to Simplify Formatting of Text and Objects

PowerPoint is great for putting together image presentations, but it isn’t the greatest design software. Having to apply the same set of commands to individual slides can get old fast, but that’s where the F4 key comes into play: it allows you to repeat the last command or keystroke you just did.

For example, if you wanted to italicize titles, or change the text to white, or change the justification of text boxes (or images!) you should highlight the first instance, open the font dialog box (Format > Font) and make all of the changes to the text at once. When you want to make the same changes in the next instance, highlight the text, press F4, and the same set of edits will be immediately applied.

Another useful PowerPoint tip: To quickly change the background to black and the text to white on your entire presentation, click on the Themes tab and choose the “Black” option, third in the list.

Feel free to contact us if you’re having difficulty formatting your PowerPoint or KeyNote presentations, or check out our page on Displaying Images to see some other resources about creating presentations.

Via Tech For Luddites

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Images on the Web Renaissance - Baroque VRC

Hand-Colored De Bry Engravings of 1590

Picturing the New World: The Hand-Colored De Bry Engravings of 1590 is a resource from UNC Libraries that presents the digitized engravings Theodore De Bry (1528–98) illustrated for A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. These hand-colored engravings were based on the watercolors of John White, who became part of the first British colony in North America, which was established off the coast of what is now North Carolina in 1585. Although the colonists were only there for about a year, White painted the environment and people of North America.

In 1588, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia was published, containing stories and descriptions about the new land. De Bry worked directly from John White’s watercolors to create 27 engravings for the illustrated edition to create what would be the first published images of Native Americans. However, the digital collection notes:

While the De Bry engravings shown on this site represent the earliest published images of Native Americans, viewers should be careful not to interpret these as accurate depictions of the inhabitants of North Carolina in the late sixteenth century. The images shown here are twice removed from John White’s original watercolors. In the engravings created by Theodore De Bry, there are many subtle but significant changes from White’s originals: the facial structure of most of the people has been altered, resulting in portraits that look more like Europeans; the musculature on most of the people is much more defined in the De Bry engravings; and the poses of many of the subjects seem to reflect classical statuary. The colorist for this volume has contributed to the distortion of the original images by adding a pale skin tone and blonde hair to some of the people and decorating much of the vegetation in colors that are unlike anything that occurs naturally in this part of the world.

For more information and to explore the digital collection, visit Picturing the New World: The Hand-Colored De Bry Engravings of 1590.