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Visual Resources Update December/January 2022-2023

Visual Resources Update December/January 2022-2023

Monuments Men and Women in Permanent Exhibition

A man in an army uniform is standing and turning pages in a large book while looking at the photographer.
Captain B. Marriott, Regional MFAA Officer. A. S. Pennoyer Collection, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

Visual Resources is pleased to provide high quality images from the Albert Sheldon Pennoyer Collection for use in a permanent exhibition at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. The collection is unique in that many of the operation’s principal officers are both captured and identified by Pennoyer in a series of portraits that comprise one of six photo albums. The Monuments Men and Women Foundation in Dallas, Texas is helping mount the New Orleans exhibition, and we look forward to a future visit to see this department collection displayed for the public.

Wintersession workshops: mosaics and GLAM data

A young woman is seated at a table holding pliers and wearing safety goggles. To the left a woman leans over her, instructing.
Yichin Chen instructs one of the students in the mosaic workshop. Photo: John Blazejewski.
Full view of completed color stone mosaic.
Completed mosaic by session participant, Grace Coller. Photo: Grace Coller.
Man at podium (Matt Chandler) instructing class in data cleaning practices
Matt Chandler, Research Data Services Manager at Princeton University Library, instructing on data cleaning (Photo: John Blazejewski)

VR facilitated two wintersession workshops on January 17 and 18: one on mosaics and another on data visualization of museum collection information (specifically, that of the Princeton University Art Museum). We would like to thank our collaborators: Katy Knortz and Bart Devolder for the mosaic session. Katy provided an overview of the history of mosaics and their construction in antiquity and Bart showed the challenges of removing the Antioch mosaics embedded in the University Museum walls, an awe-inspiring task. More thanks go to Carolina Roe-Raymond (Data Visualization Analyst, Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering), Matt Chandler (Research Data Services Manager, Princeton University Library) and Frances Lloyd-Baynes (Manager, Art Information, Princeton University Art Museum) who walked participants through museum collection data structures, and how to clean and visualize the information within. We intend to offer more workshops on working with data, so please let us know what you would like!

Dr. Leigh Lieberman at AIASCS

Leigh Lieberman at a podium speaking with a projected image to the right
Dr. Leigh Lieberman at the podium for AIA/SCS January 6 2023, photo by Dr. Sarah Bond

Leigh organized a workshop sponsored by the Forum for Classics, Libraries, and Scholarly Communication (the FCLSC) for the joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies this January in New Orleans, Louisiana. The workshop, entitled Supporting Open Data: Challenges and Potential Opportunities, brought together developers, librarians, researchers, and instructors to discuss how our institutions can begin the long and expensive process of adapting infrastructures to not just accommodate but promote open data, as well as the potential outcomes of this important shift for the study of the Greco-Roman world. By focusing on these potential outcomes, the panelists demonstrated how we can begin to develop standards that not only incentivize open data publishing in our disciplines, but also prioritize the creation of sustainable, scalable models for the institutions that maintain them.

Interesting resources and projects

Katy Fortney, of the California Digital Library, offers an excellent overview of the challenges of publishing with images in her article:  Images, Copyright, and the Future of Digital Publishing in the Arts.

A NEW YEAR = NEW PUBLIC DOMAIN and you can see a collection of works from the Princeton University Library Special Collections now in the public domain in this digital exhibition.

Harvard student Cynthia Chen created this interactive data visualization of color in acrylic works at the Harvard Art Museums. She used their open API and a platform for creative coding called Open Processing.

Explore an exhibition of a collection similar in nature to the Brünnow and Butler collections in Visual Resources–that of the German Turfan Expeditions (1902-1914) to central Asia.