Visual Resources Update February 2022

VR was happy to take part in Lucy Partman’s (Ph.D., 2021) ART106 Looking Lab: Experiments in Visual Thinking and Thinking about Visuals course on February 10. Yichin Chen provided glass lantern slide and 35mm slide projection as well as a demonstration of a stereoscope using cards from the department collections.

Visual Resources delivered three large handmade maps to the Maps and Geospatial Information Center in the Fine Hall Wing of Lewis Library, where GIS librarian Wangyal Shawa and his team have generously offered to scan the maps and help us georeference them. The maps are from the Howard Crosby Butler Expeditions to Syria (1899, 1904/5 and 1909). The GIS center will publish the maps on their platform, allowing them to be discoverable and usable on platforms like StoryMaps.

Yichin Chen participated in 2022 NYC Digital Humanities Week. Workshops of note were an introduction to Manifold, an open-source publishing platform that allows researchers to publish their scholarly works and get feedback through annotations and reading groups. This platform is suitable for text-heavy projects that can benefit from community discussion. And a workshop introducing Python, which could help us sort and clean messy data: some of the most popular uses of this programming language are for data analysis and automating repetitive tasks.

Interesting projects and resources:

For innovative arts and humanities projects out of Harvard, check out metaLAB’s recent series.

The Bibliothèque du Château de Chantilly has uploaded whole manuscript of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, freely available, in unprecedented image quality.

Read a fascinating blog post about the unique technical challenges of digitizing the Batak manuscripts at the British Library.

Visual Resources Update January 2022

Visual Resources has been helping faculty obtain images and permissions for their forthcoming publications. This semester we are utilizing the new Michigan/Princeton sinaiarchive.org collection to identify images for what will no doubt be a valuable resource: a book on the icon, edited by Prof. Charlie Barber.

If you are a professor, graduate student or undergrad with a digital project idea, or questions about digital skills or platforms, let us know (gearhart@princeton.edu). We would like to know what the department is interested in exploring and producing.

Interesting projects, resources:

Imagine Rio is a searchable digital atlas that illustrates the social and urban evolution of Rio de Janeiro, as it existed and as it was imagined. Views of the city created by artists, maps by cartographers, and site plans by architects or urbanists are all located in both time and space.

Thanks to support from the Kress Foundation, Smarthistory has added more than 3,000 high resolution photos of works of art and architecture for teaching and learning. Find them here.

The Rijksmuseum has published the largest and most detailed photo ever taken of a work of art (717 gigapixels) of The Night Watch.

Go to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s ‘Virtual CMA Dashboard‘ to view live datasets (updated daily) that answer questions like: What are the most viewed and downloaded artworks? What department of the museum garners the most online views? This is great work visualizing collections.

CENOBIUM is a KHI (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz) collaborative project with Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche for the multimedia representation of Romanesque cloister capitals in the Mediterranean region.

See a short blog post and explore around 400 images from one of the most successful photography studios in the Ottoman Empire, Abdullah Frères. Europeana is a wonderful aggregation portal offering access to many smaller archives and museums in Europe.

Visual Resources Update December 2021

The food-safe silicone molds were made, the chocolate tempered, the chocolate casts can now be revealed. We have learned a lot about resources on campus, 3d models, molds and casting. If you have any questions about the process, or want to see the models and results, please visit 2-N-7/8 or email visres@princeton.edu.

We have populated the image viewer in ART202 (Spring, 2022) with 50 objects, many with multiple images, for students to review independently of lectures. If you are interested in having course images in Canvas please contact gearhart@princeton.edu.

The new website for the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expeditions to Sinai is now officially public: https://www.sinaiarchive.org. This digital collection is unique in its presentation because we offer the cataloguing information on the work of art itself as well as detailed cataloguing information on the images of that work. This is because:

• the images belong to two separate institutions and they need to be contacted individually for permission to publish
• the images were created using different kinds of film and lighting, on different years, showing very different views of the same works of art

We look forward to sharing more of the collection through this innovative platform.

Interesting projects, resources:

New digital project from the Getty Museum, MESOPOTAMIA: An intimate look at some extraordinary objects from an exhibition at the Getty Villa.

The South Sea Bubble Research Portal offers an opportunity to explore the collections of Harvard Baker Library relating to the 1720 financial crisis. Includes interactive annotations of fascinating prints.

New crowdsourcing project at the Library of Congress: the Frederick Law Olmsted papers. People interested in Olmsted may also enjoy the interactive map showing Olmsted projects across the U.S., available at https://olmstedonline.org.

Visual Resources Update November 2021

Having become a familiar sight in the hallway of 2-N Green Hall, the Department’s plaster casts inspired VR to begin a fun holiday project that touches on many of their daily activities. And since there is no better way to learn something than to do it, everyone decided to contribute to a process where images, permissions, and endless reproductions all meet. The subjects are the busts of Metrodorus and Pericles, and a chocolate form the final result, with the crucial intermediate steps of 3D printing and mold making. VR licensed (yes, this step is necessary!) image files from Flyover Zone, a creator of digital 3D models. Next, Yichin Chen, East Asian Cataloguer, brought the files to the StudioLab, a “creative technology space for all members of the Princeton University community,” where one can learn how to 3D print things oneself, or ask for help. Yichin chose 20% infill with an extra smooth surface and it took 13 hours to print one 10 cm-high model, with thrilling results! The next step is using food-safe silicone around the models to make molds of the busts. In December’s VR update we will describe the last step of the project: using the silicone molds to make chocolate models. Stay tuned.

Jacob Wheeler has been working on the finishing touches (custom javascript, css and html) for the new Sinai archive website, which will be publicly launched at the Byzantine Studies Conference on December 11th with our colleagues at the University of Michigan. This project has been actively developed since 2015 and we are excited to finally have the structure to include all the images at Michigan and Princeton together.

Three large commercial desiccant dehumidifiers have been installed in the Green Hall basement storage rooms to help maintain the proper environment for Department collections. This is a significant improvement over the conditions of the rooms in McCormick Hall, and will help in collection preservation.

Interesting projects, resources:

‘Art & The Country House’: Explore the collection and display of art in eight country houses around Britain (Paul Mellon Centre)

‘Ancient Olympia: Common Grounds’: a virtual tour of Olympia created by Microsoft and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports.

We have shared Tropy (an open source image management software) before, and if you are not familiar they have a new “getting started” YouTube video out.

The Society of Antiquaries of London collections catalogue now includes their archives and object records: https://collections.sal.org.uk/home

Digital Exhibition (actually, many exhibitions!): Translation is Power from the larger ‘Early Modern Translation Cultures (1450-1800)’ project.

Visual Resources Update October 2021

Many of you have probably seen the job posting for a Digital Project Specialist. Since 2015 Visual Resources has launched several digital projects. VR is increasingly serving in an advisory and exploratory role for faculty and graduate students looking to create projects online. The cataloguing experience of VR, as well as our familiarity with diverse visual material, can be a great help to projects involving images/works from any collection. It is our hope that this new appointment can leverage our knowledge in combination with their own skills to support a departmental hub for digital exhibits and projects.

VR received a teaching collection of Levantine pottery sherds from the estate of A. Orley Swartentruber who obtained them from R.B.Y. Scott. Prof. Scott was an Old Testament scholar in the Department of Religion from 1955 to 1968. The collection includes pieces from locations such as Jerash and Amman. Please let us know if you would like to use this as a teaching collection, we would be happy to provide it to you or any other department on campus.

We are also making available another collection consisting of marble and stone pieces, believed to be assembled by Amanda Claridge with specimens from Richard Stillwell. The collection is currently in Prof. Holzman’s office while we arrange better storage.

Lantern Slide Projection

Glass lantern slide reads: Stoa of Hadrian and mosque

Glass lantern slide label reads: Hermes Street, Athens.

We were happy to provide lantern slide projection in ART207 and would like to remind everyone that we retained many lantern slides and only deaccessioned those that were either images from publications, poor quality, or of prolifically available views. Please reach out if you are looking for anything specific!

INTERESTING PROJECTS AND RESOURCES:

A terrific resource for historical sources from collections not always accessible through major catalogs: The ‘Decolonised’ Digital Archive

The Digital Image:  from the International Journal for Digital Art History and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), this publication “combines projects from a multiperspectival point of view and addresses the central role that the image plays in the process of the digitization of knowledge in theory and practice.”

You can now make your own online British Library Exhibit with iiif!

From the University of Edinburgh, MINDSHIFT: Confronting a colonial collection

The Butler Syria transcription project made the From the Page blog!

Visual Resources Update September 2021

ART100 virtual gallery platform

Visual Resources is working with graduate students Samuel Shapiro and Iheanyichukwu Onwuegbucha to use a virtual gallery platform called Artsteps in Art100 this semester. Students will select artwork in or around Princeton and will work in groups to create an exhibition with a cohesive narrative. We are excited to assess the performance of this software and may continue to use it in ART100. Unfortunately, copyright concerns require the gallery to be restricted to those associated with the course.

Our new transcription project: The Syrian Expedition notebooks

We have launched our new crowdsourced transcription project, focused on the notebooks and diaries of the Howard Butler Crosby Syrian Expeditions Archive (1899, 1904/5, 1909). This project aims to transcribe the writings that include descriptions of people and places missing from the published volumes. We intend to publish the data as a dataset and digital collection as well as create an interactive map to tell the story of the expeditions across time and space. Each location will include the photographs, drawings and descriptions the expedition team produced at the site. This will illustrate not only the exceptional nature of these travels, but also the process of this method of archaeological surveying. It is challenging handwriting to decipher, but we already have fourteen transcribers from across the globe onboard!

Interesting projects, resources:

Unsilencing the Archives: The Laborers of the Tell en-Nasbeh Excavations (1926-1935) is a unique and insightful online exhibition by the Bade Museum of Biblical Archaeology highlighting the work of archaeological excavators. Many of the workers at Tell en-Nasbeh also worked at the Princeton Antioch excavation.

Can artificial intelligence catalog art? In “Explain Me the Painting: Multi-Topic Knowledgeable Art Description Generation” by Zechen Bai, Yuta Nakashima, Noa Garcia (Osaka University), the authors give their take on this topic so pertinent to our time. (Given at the International Conference on Computer Vision, 2021.)

As always, please reach out if you would like help sourcing an image:

Visual Resources Update July/August 2021

On July 21 the University of Notre Dame announced a new platform for online access to library and museum holdings. MARBLE, short for Museums, Archives, Rare Books and Libraries Exploration offers “an online teaching and research platform designed to make distinctive cultural heritage collections from across the University accessible through a single portal.”

Like Notre Dame, Princeton has multiple different gateways to different campus collections and would benefit from a more integrated digital ecosystem. The Princeton University Art Museum, for example, has already integrated its collections into the library catalog. What makes MARBLE possible is the iiif system, the same framework which allows VR to incorporate images directly into courses in Canvas.

The VR is currently working with Princeton University Library IT to assess the possibility of the department image collection being catalogued into the library digital collections repository for enhanced discoverability and access. The biggest hurdle to combining systems, as described in the Notre Dame article, is the difference between various collections’ cataloguing practices and terms. The VR’s work on standardizing and improving metadata consistency will help the integration with current library standards. Test batches of works and images have been promising!

See the latest announcement from Visual Resources on the A&A website here: Major New Online Resource for the Study of Ancient Antioch Launched

Interesting projects, resources:

From the British Library Endangered Archive Programme: a new photography collection documenting late 19th and early 20th Century Nepal

This important and unique collection of photographs gives a fascinating insight into life in Nepal at a time when the country was under self-imposed isolation from the outside world. The photographs include portraits, diplomatic visits, landscapes, historic structures, and festivals. They capture images of urbanization, changes in the lifestyle and infrastructural transformation in Nepal. From the DirghaMan and GaneshMan Chitrakar Art Foundation photographic collection.

3D scans to accompany Troy: myth and reality exhibition, a collaboration with Sketchfab creates new digital content for ancient objects:

Stay tuned for a major project announcement from Visual Resources in September …

Visual Resources Update June 2021

We have been busy with the move and set-up of our spaces in Green Hall, so this update will include some outside resources and projects from this past month that you may find interesting.

The annual iiif conference took place June 22-24. Of particular interest were the presentations and conversations around:

StrollView: a cross-institutional storytelling application that we have added to our list of lightweight software to possibly utilize for digital exhibitions. You can see a blank presentation here. StrollView is much like another platform, Exhibit, which debuted last year at the iiif conference. Exhibit offers a way for you to walk viewers through a single, complex, digital object. For a project involving more robust content there is another new platform, Madoc, which allows for the display, enrichment and curation of digital objects. It supports exhibitions inviting others to annotate or contribute commentary on works displayed from archives, libraries and museums.

A nicely designed and curated exhibition on the life and works of Thomas Lawrence by The Holburne Museum.

Exploring Stereographs (a project by David Newbury).

Finally, the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC made the announcement that, as of June 16, all of its images of public domain artworks are also officially CC0 (public domain) as well. Great news and we hope more museums follow suit.

Visual Resources Update May 2021

SENIOR STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER WORK

VR received a large number of image request before the pandemic, and those increased in 2020. John Blazejewski (Senior Staff Photographer and Digital Imaging Specialist) primarily captured images from the Weitzmann/Sinai collection and the Antioch and Morgantina excavations and continued to edit images for the various digital projects VR has in process, such as the Greek Lantern Slide Digitization Project. In September of 2020, John returned to his studio in McCormick Hall for a few hours a week where he photographed, scanned, and edited original material (most from Marquand) for publications for a number of A&A faculty, other faculty and research scholars, and the VR.  He also (virtually) met with and advised graduate students regarding camera purchases, use, and software. We were unable to celebrate John’s (30 year!) work anniversary in 2020 but hopefully we can remedy that in the future.

COLLECTIONS

A recent meeting of scholars currently working and publishing Antioch explored one of the most frustrating aspects of the excavation: that the material has been ‘atomized’ (as Asa Eger, Associate Professor, UNC Greensboro describes it) across the globe. For example, Prof. Alan Stahl located a notebook by Clarence Fisher from the very beginning of the excavation, unknown to those studying Antioch, held at ASOR, Boston. From reviewing archival correspondence, Julia Gearhart has recently located teaching collections of pottery at Yale, Bryn Mawr, and the Walters Museum in Baltimore. Teaching collections have also been tracked to Wellesley College and the University of Cincinnati but these have not been located. Three gifts of sculpture to individuals are also being sought as is the provenance of an Antioch mosaic currently for sale in NYC. Most people are familiar with the mosaics in museums, but there is considerably more than that: the story of the Antioch excavation continues…

EXHIBITIONS AND FALL COURSE PREPARATION

Plans are underway for the next exhibition, which will be somewhere in Green Hall (to be determined over the summer). However, if anyone would like to consider incorporating an exhibition into their fall or spring course we would be happy to assist. Likewise, if you would like to incorporate specific images into the image viewer on your course page in Canvas we would be happy to help with that as well. Please email Julia Gearhart if interested.

INTERESTING PROJECTS AND RESOURCES:

National Gallery virtual exhibiton (‘The Director’s Choice’)

A special exhibit at the Oriental Institute: 19th century photographs of Iran by Antoin Sevruguin

An interesting copyright issue concerning public sculpture: Romanian politician gears up to sue Brancusi’s heir over longstanding copyright battle

Visual Resources Update April 2021

COLLECTIONS

Justin Willson, Postgraduate Research Associate in medieval art, recently asked us for a quality image of Smyrna, Evangelical School A.1, fol. 2v, the Creation. Since the actual manuscript was destroyed by fire in 1922 he was hoping for a better quality image than what he could obtain from existing publications. Some images can be found online, but those of folio 2v are quite poor. Lo and behold, there is an envelope of photographic prints of this manuscript in the VR Weitzmann image collection. On the back of each print is a stamp with the name Paul Buberl, an Austrian art historian. From the stamp it is unclear whether Buberl took the photograph, or whether it was simply in his collection or produced by him and given to Weitzmann. Regardless, the quality of all the prints is quite good, so John Blazejewski photographed and edited the print to produce a quality image.

The move out of McCormick Hall has required the reorganization of VR collections which have filled all corners of the second floor. In one of the less accessible storage rooms a handful of large images of architecture on old particle board were leaning in between the cabinets of oversized mounted prints. On the back of each is a sticker from the Museum of Modern Art. We have not completed the research, but we believe these are associated with the 1932 MoMA exhibition on Modern Architecture.

Image no. 1003 Butler Syria Archive, captioned: "Private house, Deraman, taken 5/4/1905."

NYTimes caption: A Syrian girl sitting in the ancient ruins of Deir Amman, now home to hundreds of displaced Syrians. Photo by Ivor Prickett.

Of note: this recent NY Times article, addressing the living situations in which many Syrian refugees currently find themselves, with ancient sites once again providing shelter. As the VR Butler Syria Location Concordance Project continues, here is a view of a private house at Deir Amman from Howard Crosby Butler’s 1905 expedition, and again today, with a little girl looking out from her family’s encampment (photograph by Ivor Prickett). Through the online publication of Butler’s photographs and journals we hope to shed some light on these sites, some of which have been changed by war, others which have very much stayed the same.

NEW VIDEO TUTORIAL: TIMED POWERPOINT SLIDESHOWS

INTERESTING PROJECTS AND RESOURCES:

• Explore the extensive digitization efforts of the Louvre.
• Wildenstein Plattner Institute offers an online archives/auctions viewer.
• Have you heard of fingernail art?
• Update to Zotero: fantastic built-in PDF reader with many annotation features; better notes; a new tabbed interface so you can have multiple items open at the same time; full support for embedded images. Also, iOS app is coming soon and Princeton is now offering free unlimited storage!