Tag Archives: day two

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Illuminating Tenth-Century France: thinking toward sources

A beginning set of issues to think through:

• Re. identifying primary sources and providing a basis for collaborative study/the presentation of results.

—   Sources currently available in digital repositories (e.g., Enluminures, library sites) will be unevenly represented regarding amount of material (full ms, excerpts, script only, illuminations only), quality of reproduction, amount and quality of metadata.

—   We will need a consistent minimum standard for the material included that will support both the presentation of conclusions and the ongoing evaluation of examples. Whenever possible, a full manuscript should be available; this will require either linking to an extant digitization or working with repositories to acquire one.

—   Every manuscript must be represented by its full range of scripts, images and decorative elements. Metadata must include measurements, material description, and binding information. In most cases, an initial source for descriptive data will be found in extant catalogues, but all require verification and most likely expansion.

 

• Re. compiling bibliography and providing on-site reference material.

—   A running bibliography, modifiable by participants, and grouped by category, is essential.

—   Is it possible to include the text of relevant studies for easy reference, e.g., chapters in de la Borderie, Cambridge Medieval History, Celtic Encyclopedia; catalogues of Bischoff, Lowe, & Co.?

 

• Re. textual sources/textual evidence for non-extant sources.

—   As above, is it possible to provide editions of desiderata for review? (e.g., charters, inventories, saints’ lives, chronicles)

—   Textual sources require their own section, with material for historical essays and lost monument evidence held separately.

Source: Illuminating Tenth-Century France: thinking toward sources

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Intro to “Rebuilding the Portfolio” Project

Illuminating Tenth-Century France

Tenth-century France is off the art-historical map, although France largely defines studies of the ninth century, and then again the eleventh century and beyond. The Vikings provide the standard grounds for this gap: tenth-century France was ravaged by invasions, which slowed artistic production and created a messy landscape of people fleeing, taking refuge, emigrating, and returning home. We do, in fact, have a drastically under-studied corpus of manuscripts loosely attributed to tenth-century France: books traveled too, as did scribes and illuminators. Much of this record is only cursorily catalogued, and it is scattered through libraries in a great many countries. This state of affairs is daunting, but also offers an enormous opportunity for collaborative scholarship. Faced with tracking the provenance of manuscripts from this period and sorting out the jungle of elements in both text and image that define the material record, a digital platform seems a promising way forward. A corpus must be gathered; varying factors of script, layout, image, text, and book-construction must be weighed, compared, and coordinated with historical geography. If the movements of people and things have been grounds for despair in attempting to account for tenth-century French manuscripts using traditional methods, they may also be the key to understanding this fascinating corpus when framed by new approaches to mapping, spatial- and data analysis. Beginning with the training at George Mason this summer, I aim to develop a digital environment for tackling tenth-century France that cultivates international collaboration, supports the training of students, and relies on the rigorous study of primary materials.

Source: Intro to “Rebuilding the Portfolio” Project

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Comparing Artist Book Digital Collection

Otis College of Art and Design

http://www.otis.edu/library/artists-books 

  • Platform: CONTENTdm
  • Easy to access through Google search
  • Browsing and advance search capabilities
  • Additional benefit of Guided Search offering dropdown menus listing authors, presses, bindings, techniques, subjects, and book types
  • Extensive metadata
  • Clicking on thumbnail images links to multiple images of same book plus metadata
  • Can search for similar bindings, materials, and other characteristics through links BUT linking options can be overwhelming
  • Website links to videos hosted on YouTube

 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

http://www.sscommons.org/openlibrary/welcome.html 

  • Platform: Shared Shelf Commons through ARTstor
  • Open access
  • ARTstor search capabilities and image viewing (zoom, print, export, etc.)
  • Each image of a book requires a separate record
  • No video or audio
  • VRA Core built into system
  • Created extensive thesaurus
  • Metadata does not provide linking which could help with browsing
  • Paid subscription (Mason already subscribes)
  • Searching: Not easy to locate through Google but listed as separate collection in Shared Shelf

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Day 2: Project Planning

Does the world need another website?

This question weighs heavily on me and my colleagues at the Archives of American Art.  As an individual scholar, what value does a new site devoted to [my] interests add to the already crowded field pages that compete for attention? As a representative of the Smithsonian, how does a new site devoted to content area advance our mission “to increase the diffusion of knowledge.”

The digital project we are currently undertaking allows us to present and interpret audio excerpts from oral history interviews.  To date, we have served transcripts from these interviews in person in our manuscript reading rooms and on our website.  A digital project may enable us to expand our presentation of oral histories to include aural histories.

 

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Day 2

Q: How to find and organize all that data? A: Zotero! Well, a partial answer, anyway. A very good answer, I think, for how to keep track of bibliographic sources, archival documents, and images. It still seems I will need a different kind of database to create the internet interface I want to have. This IS only day two of our ten-day workshop, however, so I am sure there will be lots of answers to the big question of HOW TO MAKE THIS PROJECT A REALITY.

It was fun to play around with Zotero today, and to discuss many issues about finding and organizing information. I am happy to be meeting art historians from all over and with many specializations. There is even an art historian from Brazil—ouch, Brazil! that was a painful loss today—and one from Argentina, too—let’s go, Argentina! for the Americas! But I digress.

Today’s homework is to “identify relevant digital repositories and consider ways to create an intentional archive of sources.” That seems both easy and difficult. Easy because I do already know many good sources. Difficult because there are surely several more and I don’t want to miss any. One wonderful font of sources for my project will undoubtedly be the ICAA–MFAH’s “Documents of Twentieth-Century Latin American and Latino Art.” But how useful will it be to add documents from that site to my own intentional archive of sources when they already have a tool for saving “my documents” on their site? I suppose I will want to have all documents specific to my project saved in one place, like Zotero. Another repository that I know I will use is the Biblioteca Virtual of the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango (Bogotá), especially for the Colombian biennials. Fellow institute participant Georgina Gluzman has pointed me to the Internet Archive as a good place to find “many primary sources on Argentina and Latin America.” I look forward to scouring those sites, to begin with, for information to help build my project. Now that I know a bit more about metadata, I am wondering, will they have metadata that I can easily scrape to save some time? So much to discover.

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Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango’s Biblioteca Virtual is a great place to search for sources on Colombian art and a site I have used heavily in other projects. They have many of their own more recent art exhibition catalogs available online, as well as images from their permanent collection, but much, much more since they are primarily a library.

Altogether, another satisfying, if exhausting, day. As another participant Tweeted, it’s like “digital art history bootcamp.”

Source: Day 2

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Project Planning: Identify relevant digital repositories and consider ways to create an intentional archive of sources for our next day.

My project concerns architecture and space in an ancient Maya city. Textual sources, visual sources, and links tend to be located in area- and discipline-specific repositories. MesoWeb and FAMSI (Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc.) are my go-to websites.
FAMSI contains an extensive bibliography that is routinely updated; immense archives of photographs and drawings of sites, architecture, artifacts (including Maya vases), and writing that scholars have posted and are copyright free for educational use and academic publishing. The same is true for the Maya vase database, although written permission is required. In addition, grantee reports are available from the era when FAMSI was a generous source of funding for Mesoamerican projects in archaeology, art history, and epigraphy. Scholars post essays about writing/decipherment, archaeology, history, and ethnohistory. Most of the major Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts are available on-line (not copyright free), which is a boon for those whose libraries lack these resources. And, there is a K-12 section for educators. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art currently houses FAMSI.
MesoWeb is both more extensive and more cumbersome than FAMSI (its search engine yields many, many results). It includes many sections, including an open-source journal, the PARI Journal (Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute); many major Mesoamerican books and articles in pdf form (some are from rare, expensive, or out-of-print volumes); rubbings of sculpture from many Maya sites (a technique that allows one to observe carved marks that may no longer be visible); photographs of sites and artifacts; season-by-season photographs and records of archaeological projects; and a database of articles and reference materials. All of the sources are copyright free. A group of archaeologists and art historians curate the site.
Both FAMSI and MesoWeb continue to grow. At least two factors are responsible for the open source ethos of the sites: a few influential scholars who wanted to share, not hoard, information; and the collegial spirit–living, working, and drinking beer together–that pervades New World archaeology. FAMSI and MesoWeb are, to me, paragons of scholarly ideals.
Last semester one essay question choice for my Precolumbian art history class involved FAMSI, which we consulted in class and was essential for student projects. The students had many suggestions for updating the site, including the addition of videos and an easier search engine. After today’s class I know that one can search via Google for a more fine-grained and successful search.

Source: Project Planning: Identify relevant digital repositories and consider ways to create an intentional archive of sources for our next day.

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What to do with all the photographs

Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DCDumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC

Artamanoff’s photographs are split primarily between two collections, The Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, and the Archives of the Freer and Sackler Galleries, where they are part of the Myron Bement Smith Collection. A few other photographs are held at Columbia University and at the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. Almost all of the photographs may be seen on the Artamanoff site created by the Dumbarton Oaks team who carried out the initial research on Artamanoff, Günder Varinlioğlu and Alyssa DesRochers.

That’s the good news. But at just over a thousand images, the collection still poses significant challenges in terms of organizing the material in a way that is relevant and will lend itself to easy analysis. Spreadsheet? Database? Something more sophisticated and powerful I have yet to learn about? Is there a silver bullet out there for organizing large numbers of images for research?

Source: What to do with all the photographs

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Starting the research…digitally

I wrote my dissertation on the collection of murals in Chicago’s public schools (about 2000 mural panels commissioned for schools between 1904-1941).  It was a fantastic project and I loved every minute of the research. I trudged through the halls and auditoria of hundreds of public schools in every section of the city in search of murals, often accompanied by teachers, conservators, janitors and students who told me stories of the school and wondered why I cared so much about the faded paintings on the walls.  I pored through the papers of the women’s clubs who commissioned the early murals, reading the carefully handwritten notes which revealed the genesis of the school mural movement. I spent days reviewing oral histories and archival papers of the New Deal artists who created the monumental frescoes in city schools in the 30s and early 40s. The archival research that I carried out in Chicago and DC was pivotal in my writing. I was able to create a database of murals — both extant and lost — that had not been compiled before and it allowed me set the foundation for my thesis.

When I first set out to research Pittsburgh’s public murals,  I thought the process would be similar. Sure, there are some similarities, and some of the research questions do overlap. However, the number of digital resources available to me now is far greater than when I worked on my dissertation, and I am hopeful that using digital repositories will add another dimension to my research. I will certainly consult the digitized collections of the Archives of American Art for this project, though it seems that some of the papers I will need have not yet been digitized.  I will also use the Historic Pittsburgh collection http://digital.library.pitt.edu/pittsburgh/ to access maps, photos, and census records, though this resource is still not quite as extensive as I might need and does not always deal with the time periods in question.  I am most interested in finding a digital tool that might allow me to map the murals across time and to annotate the murals. When working on the Chicago project, I mapped the murals manually and tried to manage a huge collection of visual images on my hard drive, but I never managed to adequately visualize the school mural collection in a manner that would show their relationships to one another. I am hoping that I will be able to find a way to do this with the Pittsburgh murals.

Source: Starting the research…digitally

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Project Planning: T.U. Walter in the US (ca. 1830-50) and/or Europe (1838)

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Locating relevant digital repositories

For my project, “Mapping the Dynamic Landscape of Architectural Practice,” I need to find sources for the following subjects:

1. information about T. U. Walter’s projects in different states; his modes of transportation and communication; data (location, date) of particular building projects

2. maps of the US, ca. 1830-1850: maps have been sourced from the following websites: David Rumsey Map Collection (1835), Wikipedia (1835), Antique Prints Blog (1840)

3. Maps/information about networks of different kinds: post roads, railroads, shipping routes, etc.: these have been much harder to track down.

Creating intentional archives of sources

1. For Walter’s information: this is material I have collected for previous research projects, primarily from the Walter Archives at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

2. US Maps: saved in Zotero.

Footnote: if necessary maps pertaining to the proposal are not easily accessible, the project may shift to chronicling Walter’s 1838 tour of Europe, tracking his movements, means of conveyance, and buildings/sites visited/studied.  In this case, the following map is a good, big, high-resolution map of the correct year; unfortunately in German but we’ll work with that: Europe 1838.  Additionally, images of the buildings that he studied will be included, perhaps in some kind of pop-up boxes keyed to the map, like the one shown above (from this source); also, if permission can be granted from the institution that holds Walter’s archives (the Athenaeum of Philadelphia), scanned pages of his travel journal might be included.  Images of key buildings dating as close as possible to Walter’s visit will be sought.

Source: Project Planning: T.U. Walter in the US (ca. 1830-50) and/or Europe (1838)

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digital repositories

digital repositories

For my work the most useful sites for 19th-century art are the UK sites of the Royal Geographical Society, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the US sites of the National Gallery and the Delaware Art Museum. These all offer images for scholars for free or for very nominal fees and since my needs include photographs, as well as paintings and fashion,  these sites offer many important images I can use. To create a list of these it might be useful to create in a file or perhaps on Zotero, a kind of bibliography of sites noting the most important content each site offers.

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