Visual Resources Update April 2022

Visual Resources Update April 2022

native american man with hand to chin, looking left
Gertrude Käsebier, [Native American man], platinum print, ca. 1899. Amon Carter Museum.
Prof. Martha Sandweiss in the Department of History recently donated her 35mm slide collection to VR. We are currently sorting through the contents, including works from the Amon Carter Museum, which Sandweiss collected as an historian of the American West. This subject area is an exciting addition to the general image collection. If anyone is interested in looking through the slides, please stop by 2N7/8 or contact visres@princeton.edu.

Black and white skyline of Baltimore

VR took part in the annual Visual Resources Association conference, attending talks on accessibility support in digital collections, digital visualization tools in the humanities, and the very analog role visual resource centers are playing in providing object collections in support of art history courses.

Interesting resources and projects:

The Getty Museum has launched a major update to its collection pages: which includes new features such as a CCO API. What is that? It is a way to directly query the full collection programmatically. Thankfully, they have also offered three tutorials to explain how to use the API, what Linked Art is all about, and how to build your own visual analysis of linked cultural heritage records.

Photographic archives: lists in script, boxes, black and white photographic prints

Archival Practices in the Photothek: An Online Exhibition of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut

As the exhibition lays out in its introductory paragraph: “Archives are no temples of memory where documents of the past are simply preserved. They are rather places where documents are produced, transformed, and reconfigured to be passed on to future generations, as well as to find new uses for them.” Explore a fundamental art historical collection through this fascinating exhibit.

Pink sunrise across an ocean with large rock formations in the foreground

Open Copyright Education Advisory Network (OCEAN) is a new initiative to address cultural heritage professionals’ need for up-to-date, reliable copyright education.

A new article examining archaeological archives is especially pertinent to those working on the Antioch excavation archive. In it, Chloë Ward writes: “Looking at the different contexts of an excavation archive, from before its creation to its ongoing curation and use, can reveal significant aspects not just of the history of archaeology but also on many of the ongoing recording methods and processes still used in the field today.”

See: Ward, C. (2022). Excavating the Archive / Archiving the Excavation: Archival Processes and Contexts in Archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Practice, 1-17. doi:10.1017/aap.2022.1