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A couple of new online sources for research on 19th century art & culture:
Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource
In other exciting online news, the good folks over at ARTstor continue to add to build their collection of images, and have even partnered with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to include more IAP images in the database. Very good news!
Exciting news — Google and LIFE have teamed up to present a digital archive of images.
I’ll admit it. I’m a Facebook addict. Ever since my good friend Amy B. encouraged me to sign up for an account a few years ago I’ve been hooked. We’ve all heard the negative things about Facebook — people spending too much time online, people posting inappropriate pictures, privacy concerns, etc. These are valid concerns, but, in my opinion, the good outweighs the bad. I love how I can keep in touch with friends and family around the world so easily — sure, I could just pick up the phone, but with Facebook I can play Scrabble er…Wordscraper, share photos and do all sorts of other fun stuff.
I was reminded this week, however, that Facebook can be used for more than just socializing. We saw a great example of this during the Canadian election, but there are many other ways that Facebook can be used to raise awareness, to bring about positive change and to bring people closer together. In the past few days alone, three amazing uses of Facebook were brought to my attention:
1) A friend was telling me how a long-lost relative found some members of her family through Facebook. I don’t want to post her story here, but I can say it was a really happy one.
2) Another friend is using Facebook to encourage people to help raise money for Prostate Cancer research. I suppose I could have found out about this and sponsored his efforts through non-Facebook ways, but since we live in different parts of the country it is highly unlikely.
3) Jane Currie and Anji Dimitriou, the two women who were recently attacked outside an Oshawa elementary school because of their sexual orientation, are using Facebook to tell their story and to fight back against violence and homophobia.
I’m sure there are many other examples of the power of Facebook out there. It fascinates me to think about how many different ways people can use a social networking site like this.
It is snowing like crazy here today! The forecast is calling for something like 50cm of snow in the Niagara region. I’m in hibernation mode today. It is nearly noon and I’m still in my PJs and am working on my 2nd mug of tea. I suppose I could be doing something a little more productive with my Saturday morning, but I’ve taken this opportunity to check out some new (to me!) websites and blogs.
Scott sent me the link to Vegan YumYum, a blog dedicated to vegan cooking. There are many great recipe ideas on here, and the photographs are simply stunning! This is too good not to share!
I also came upon Crafters for Critters through a link on Subversive Cross Stitch. Now I’m wishing I had thought to get some crafting supplies to play with as we wait out this storm. Oh well, I guess seeing pictures of other people’s creations is almost as much fun as making things!
I just wanted to quickly highlight two new additions to the “art and science links” section of this blog:
echo is a portal featuring links to many different websites and online research resources relating to the history of science and technology. There is so much good stuff here, and I love how you can browse the site by category, by time period, or by type of media.
smARThistory is one of the coolest innovations in teaching I’ve seen in ages. I met Beth Harris, one of the creators of smARThistory, while at an ARTstor faculty workshop in New York last month. Each of the participants talked about how they used digital images in the classroom, and Beth’s presentation included a demo of the smARThistory project. Very impressive! I’d love to develop something similar to teach our art history and visual culture courses at Brock, so this gave me a lot to think about.
Oh wow! The Textile Museum of Canada (already one of the coolest museums around) has just launched a wonderful web-based exhibition called Digital Threads. Check it out — I promise you won’t be disappointed!
Here’s the text from the press release: “Digital Threads is an interactive Web environment that highlights new digital artworks by Canadian artists Jennifer Angus, Joanna Berzowska, Kai Chan, Ruth Scheuing and Samuel Thomas. Internationally known for innovative work that challenges the boundaries of conventional textile arts, these five artists define new territory on the World Wide Web with dynamic projects that link to 50 exhibitions and thousands of textiles from the Textile Museum of Canada. Art and technology are fused in this project – both are creative acts, imaginative and committed to the process of discovery. Technology is not only used to deliver the content but is woven into the very fabric of the artists’ creative process. An example is Joey Berzowska’s responsive textile ensembles of the future that will not only change to camouflage stains but display the subtleties of the wearer’s mood. “I want to be able to control how aggressive my dress appears” says this artist.
This interactive project also has a studio for visitors to create their own digital work with components and concepts borrowed from the five artists – experiment with pattern, colour, shape, time and meaning. Digital Threads will also provide access to 17 years of the TMC’s exhibition programming. 50 past exhibitions are sorted into 5 themes (Myth and Science, Textiles in Everyday Life, Clothing and Communication, Moving across Cultures, and Nature, the Environment & Weird Materials). Explore these pages featuring approximately 180 contemporary artists, publicly available for the first time. Digital Threads will also make a growing number of the Textile Museum’s permanent collection available online with high detail zooming interactivity. The TMC has thousands of artifacts available in our publicly accessible database. Visitors are able to explore the collection of the TMC 24 hours a day, from anywhere in the world.”
A few days ago Linda sent me the link to a site called Square America: Snapshots & Vernacular Photography. Considering I really need to be finalizing my course outlines this week, I’ve spent far too much time looking through the various galleries here. This is an amazing website! The focus is on amateur, everyday photography and the stories these photographs can tell. Many of the images have been purchased in flea markets or on e-bay. I think the rupture between the sense of personal intimacy and memory-making that prompted the making of the photograph in the first place and the lack of information we have when we view pictures on a website like this is simply fascinating. These kinds of images are so familiar to so many of us, yet as we look at them they sometimes raise more questions than answers. In my visual culture and history of photography classes I always try to emphasize the point that imagery can hold so many different meanings depending upon the context in which an image is viewed in. I also like to encourage students to think about personal uses of images, both in their own lives but also in history. These types of images have been so often neglected by art history, which is a shame. As the site’s owner says, “Not only do these photographs contain a wealth of primary source information on how life was lived they also constitute a shadow history of photography, one too often ignored by museums and art galleries.”
Image credit: this photograph is from the “At the Window” gallery
(Square America)
We’re back from our little jaunt over to Montreal, Ottawa and Kingston. The main purpose of the trip was to see some of the gardens that I’m writing about while they are in full August bloom. I also got to do two things that I have been wanting to do for a long time: 1)attend International Flora Montréal and 2)see one of Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibitions. We also managed to work in a little kayaking while we were in Kingston. It was quite the week and I’ve got no shortage of things I want to write about, but today is all about getting unpacked and doing laundry.
In the meantime, I wanted to post the link to Digital Arts & Humanities, a very neat resource exploring ideas, issues and applications in the world of Digital Humanities. I’ve spent most of the evening checking it out and following the various links.
