Visual Resources Update March 2021

COLLECTIONS

In preparation for the upcoming move to Green Hall, VR continues to sort, pack and weed materials. The multi-volume Grove Dictionary of Art and other art reference books used in Visual Resources found a new home on 3/25 at Trenton Central High School as a lending library to students taking part in Princeton ArcPrep. ArcPrep is a program developed in part by the Princeton School of Architecture to introduce teens to the discipline of architecture, a field which sorely lacks diversity.

VR is also working on cleanup and reconciliation of past cataloging data. In honor of Women’s History Month, here is a visualization of the nationalities of women creators currently represented in our database, with bright yellow indicating the largest concentration of artists in our records. Our data examination involves looking at underrepresented creators, countries, works, etc. and planning additions to our collection that expand representation. We are also considering cataloging terminology that is no longer useful, with an eye to improving accuracy and discoverability.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Jacob attended the Harvard Art Museums lecture: “Troubling Images: Curating Collections of Historical Photographs” which discussed the analysis and presentation of photography involving troubling images of slavery and violence against indigenous peoples and communities of color. Mark Sealy of the University of the Arts London, Makeda Best of Harvard Art Museums, and Ilisa Barbash of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, presented.

VR staff (Julia, Yichin and Michele) attended the remote Visual Resources Association conference March 22-26, taking part in sessions covering: data reconciliation, improving metadata workflows, intellectual property rights, and building innovative digital projects, among others.

INTERESTING PROJECTS AND RESOURCES:

• We encourage everyone to explore the Pitt Rivers Museum: Radical Hope, Critical Change series of events as they tackle “decolonizing” the museum. The events “will focus on how Western museums have relied on colonial ideas that have erased the many ways of knowing and being of people from around the world in favour of promoting one viewpoint. The series will consider how museums can change to support humanity, our relationships to each other, to the environment and to things.”
  

• Examine the Raphael Cartoons at the Victoria and Albert Museum using iiif!

• Here is a helpful video on how to use the newly redesigned Getty Research Portal.

• Do you have trouble keeping track of your images? Check out Tropy, a “free open-source software that allows you to organize and describe photographs of research material.” Here is a webinar for graduate students (we recommend starting at the 12:00 mark if you just want the nitty-gritty). VR has requested an art-centered webinar from Tropy and it is coming!

Visual Resources Update February 2021

THE SINAI COLLECTION:

Visual Resources is finalizing the new Sinai Archive website, which will replace http://vrc.princeton.edu/sinai/  and includes all the images of the icons from the University of Michigan and Princeton together at last.

It is being used in classes this spring at Princeton with ART310 ‘The Icon’ taught by Justin Willson and at Michigan with HISTART 394-002  ‘Saints in Medieval Art’ by Paroma Pratterjee. We are not unveiling it publicly yet (that will be at the Byzantine Conference in October) but if anyone is interested in seeing it, we are sharing the link and would like feedback. We believe it to be the first use of IIIF and an image viewer to present single works with images from different collections and with different canvas-level information.

NEW VIDEO TUTORIAL: HOW TO OPEN/SAVE DPX FILES

THE BUTLER COLLECTION:

In an effort to make all of Howard Crosby Butler’s Syria Expedition archive (all notebooks and drawings) available online in an interactive map, VR is working with Butler’s own site data, and establishing concordance with other sources to determine geographic coordinates. We started this work in May 2020 with the assistance of TCNJ students, continued with the help of Princeton students over the summer, and Michele Mazeris is nearing the end of this phase of edits. The data will soon move to area specialists (including Dr. Ross Burns, former Australian Ambassador to Syria and Lebanon, who has kindly made his extensive site data available) before being published online via OpenContext.

THE MORGANTINA ARCHIVE:

While Visual Resources staff has had limited access to McCormick, efforts have been made this month to digitize large portions of the Morgantina archive’s photographic contact sheets in order to assist researchers in selecting desired negatives for higher quality scans. Professor Ingrid Edlund-Berry of UT Austin and Professor Malcolm Bell of UVA have benefited from this workflow, led by Jacob Wheeler. New photography by John Blazejewski of coin casts in the collection was also produced for Professor Bell.

INTERESTING PROJECTS AND RESOURCES:

PAINTINGS ARE NOT FLAT

The V&A launches Explore the Collections, a newly redesigned search and discovery collection interface.

Kress Foundation launches a new IIIF site. This means Visual Resources can put these images directly into the image viewer in Canvas! They’ve also launched the Kress Collection Digital Archive which documents the history, acquisition, condition and care of the more than 3,000 works of art in the collection.

Explore the entire Bayeux Tapestry online in amazing resolution!

What do we think about Yale scrapping their art history survey course? Is that even what this article describes?

A great article celebrating the open access policy at Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, and, from the National Museum of American History, a lovely example of a museum resisting the call for perfection before publishing collection records.

A really interesting resource of historical photography of China, put together by the University of Bristol: https://www.hpcbristol.net/

Eagerly awaiting the digital publication related to the upcoming exhibition: Exquisite Patterns: Japanese Textile Design, at the British Library.

Like the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, and the Finnish National Gallery, the searching, faceting and presentation of these collections is really changing!

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art which has led them (Watson Library and the Museum Archives) to digitize the records of Francis Henry Taylor, the 5th director of the museum from 1940-1955. These records make for fascinating reading, especially those concerned with the wartime safety of artworks.

A lot of people are probably familiar with the beautiful Closer to Van Eyck website about the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece. The website was recently updated and now includes further works by Jan van Eyck but beware one caveat which has been pointed out by Douglas McCarthy, Collections Manager at Europeana:

“These images are not available for commercial publications or other items made for profit. Images will be provided free of charge for scholarly publications, although shipping and handling fees may apply.”

CODART claims this while also stating that the website provides “high-quality, standardized technical images of the paintings available online in open access.”

Given that van Eyck died in 1441 these images should really be available at no fee. Thankfully, in a few years all European institutions will have to abide by Article 14: what is in the public domain in analogue form stays in the public domain in digital.

Emma Stanford, Digital Curator at the Bodleian Digital Library, created a quiz to help you find your favorite manuscript in their collection. Take it and see! Click here.

The New York-based Wildenstein-Plattner Institute (WPI) is digitizing and will make available their archives: 100 years of annotated sale catalogues, letters and notes.

Over 100,000+ artworks from 14 Paris museums are now available as open content!

The Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia has recently digitized over 1,000 drawings, prints, watercolors and posters and made high resolution images available online!

Check out this 3D image of a Japanese folding screen (Edo period, mid 17th c. by Master of I-nen Seal (1600-1630), F1962.30) from the Sackler Museum and then look at it through the collections  image viewer: https://asia.si.edu/object/F1962.30/#txtMetaData

Hooray for 3D imaging and Sketchfab!

There is a new absolutely gorgeous online collection for the National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst): https://open.smk.dk/

Learn more about the process of putting their collections online here.

Read this interesting article: The Great Wave: what Hokusai’s masterpiece tells us about museums, copyright and online collections today. By Douglas McCarthy of Europeana.

Firstly, you can now download high resolution images of every plate in John J. Audubon’s Birds of America Book!: https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/alphabetical

If you came to the Matthew Lincoln talk you may find this blog post from the digital humanities center at UVa (the Scholar’s Lab) really interesting: Thinking About [Art] Collections As Data

Newly digitized collections at the Library of Congress include the history of women’s suffrage, Civil War history, and Olmstead Associates Landscape Architectural Firm.

Explore projects at the University of Chicago to provide images of Buddhist works spread across museums back into context and with 3-D viewing. The Xiangtangshan Caves Project and the Tianlongshan Caves Project.

The Judy Chicago Research Portal bridges collections housed at Penn State University, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Ben Zweig, Digital Projects Coordinator at the National Gallery, DC recently tweeted that 22,000 high resolution CCO images from the print collection  of the National Gallery have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. A great resource.

Amazing conversations and work have come out of The Museums and Artificial Intelligence Network New York Conference and it is best summed up by Mia Ridge here. It was centered on two themes: AI and visitor data and AI and collections data. At the conference the Cooper Hewitt launched their Interaction Lab where they are “reimagining the museum experience for the 21st Century.” If you are interested in collections analysis check out Identifying Art Through Machine Learning which is a project between MoMA and Google Arts and Culture Lab.

An international forum on the art catalogue: Reloading catalogs. If anything from this is posted online we will post a link here.

Digital Humanities/Digital Art History

A great article by Sander Münster and Melissa Terras:  The visual side of digital humanities: a survey on topics, researchers, and epistemic cultures, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqz022

Slides of the final presentation of Harald Klinke from his seminar on data analysis with the MET and MoMA collections (in German).

New/Improved Digital Collections:

Searching by COLOR is now available with the Library of Congress collections and the Art Institute of Chicago

Explore the University of Oregon exhibition on Yōkai Senjafuda: a digital exhibition focuses on tiny slips of paper—senjafuda 千社札—that depict Japanese ghosts and monsters—yōkai 妖怪.

Finally, in Public Domain news: a new EU copyright directive was passed and Article 14 ensures that digital reproductions of artworks in the public domain cannot not also be in the public domain. What is public domain in analogue form must stay in the public domain in digital form. EU member states have until June 2021 to ensure their laws comply.