Visual Resources Monthly Update April 2023

Images for courses in Canvas

A list of words on the left, a detail of a medieval manuscript page at center, and thumbnail images of other manuscript pages at right.
A screenshot of the Mirador image viewer in action in a Canvas course.

The McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and Visual Resources are working together to make high-quality images available for Princeton courses directly within the university learning management system, Canvas. By utilizing the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), a set of open standards for the delivery of high-quality images and associated metadata, students can review zoom-able works of art individually, outside of the lecture sequence. These same images can also be used with several iiif-enabled external tools, supporting digital storytelling assignments in which students illustrate their writing with course images or images from universities, libraries, archives, and museums around the world. Read more about the potential of this technology here and set up a time to discuss the use in your course by emailing gearhart@princeton.edu.

1929 Mount Athos Film to be preserved

On April 14, Julia Gearhart, Director of Visual Resources, drove the surviving nitrate film reels from the 1929 Expedition to Mount Athos to The Celeste Bartos International Film Study Center in Pennsylvania. There, the staff of MoMA’s Film Department were kind enough to help ship the film to the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) in Santa Clarita, California where they will join the PHI Stoa Film Archive, a highly secure nitrate storage vault facility managed by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Visual Resources is tremendously grateful to the PHI for their help in agreeing to inspect, potentially re-scan, and house the film, as well as that of MoMA, for facilitating its transport to California.

Kidder Smith’s career honored

Orange book against white background titled G.E. Kidder Smith Builds
G.E. Kidder Smith Builds: The Travel of Architectural Photography

In 1938, when George Everard Kidder Smith (1913-1997), was still a graduate student at Princeton in the School of Architecture, he joined the excavation of Antioch-on-the-Orontes as photographer. He went on to become a very successful architectural photographer, among other things, and has now been recognized with his own monograph and in three 2022 exhibitions. Curator Andrea Nalesso will be visiting the archives of Visual Resources in May 2023 to learn more about Kidder Smith’s first professional work with the Antioch excavation.

Interesting projects and resources:

German Design Drawings Explored: New discoveries in the collections at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Glaze is a tool developed at the University of Chicago to protect artists against AI art mimicry. Glaze analyzes your art and generates a modified version. This “cloaked” image disrupts the AI mimicry process.