I will be giving a brown back talk on visualization as a tool in the humanities tomorrow, September 5th at noon. All are invited!
- Visual Knowledge
- Faculty Work
- VMW
The VMW is
a lab/
workspace/
creative zone/
vertext/
forum/
platform/
initiative/
experiment
that
sits at the intersection between/
falls between established disciplines of/
crosses the fields of
art history and information studies/
humanistic inquiry and technology/
established humanistic and new data-driven approaches
(Alex Oliver, April 2014)
I will be giving a brown back talk on visualization as a tool in the humanities tomorrow, September 5th at noon. All are invited!
Image Credit: Colby Stuart, "periodic table of visualization methods," https://flic.kr/p/xbFB1.
I will be teaching a PhD seminar this fall in the digital humanities at the iSchool here at Pitt. The draft syllabus is done for those who might be interested in seeing what is going on...check out the PDF attached at the bottom of the post.
There will be balanced focus on the theoretical and practical aspects of producing digitally-inflected work in the humanities and social sciences, and students can expect to leave the course having built something that furthers their own research. Do be in touch if you have any questions or would like any further information (contact information).
ETA: Class will be held on Mondays from 12-3pm in the School of Information Sciences.
Old Media and New Media. Image Credit: Flickr user mermaid, london street art: what are these?.
Cornell University Library has started a project. funded by the NEH, to investigate how best to preserve born-digital art objects. Their preliminary findings (survey-based) have just been published as "Interactive Digital Media Art Survey: Key Findings and Observations." The eventual goal is to publish generalizable best practices in this area. Those of you interested in such things should certainly head over there.
Rothstein, Arthur. "One of the many bridges spanning the Allegheny River. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania," July 1938. http://photogrammar.yale.edu/records/index.php?record=fsa2000007968/PP
For any of you interested in time-and-space-based visualizations of photography in America, Yale has put out their Photogrammar project for the whole run of WPA photos. As they themselves put it, "Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI)."
https://flic.kr/p/fqFKH9. Image from the The Laura Hayes and John Wileman collection of pre-20th century optical toys and illusionary devices. Donated to the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics by Dr. Ralph Wileman. To learn more about this collection visit www.dlt.ncssm.edu/collections/toys/.
This summer has seen any number of "digital art history" institutes going on, from Middlebury to UCLA. Miriam Posner, from UCLA, has just posted a very nice summary of current tools that might be of interest to any or all of you http://www.humanities.ucla.edu/getty/index.php/resources/the-digital-art-historians-toolkit/!
Thursday July 17, 2014 3:45 PM
Frick Fine Arts Building, University of Pittsburgh
Reception and Light Refreshments to Follow
The inaugural lecture in the Bernadette Callery Archives Lecture Series will be held in conjunction with the Archives Educational Research Institute (AERI) being held at the University of Pittsburgh; the lecture is free and open to the public. The lecture series honors the memory of Dr. Bernadette Callery who was a member of the iSchool faculty and who taught in the Archives specialization in the Library and Information Science program. Previous to joining the faculty, Dr. Callery was the Museum Librarian at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Before her death, Dr. Callery thoughtfully established this lecture, which was funded through a generous bequest.
Follow the Bodies, Follow the Names: One Art Historian’s Search Through the Archival Remains of the Civil War Dead
Kirk Savage
During the Civil War the problem of the “unknown dead” became a national crisis. On both sides of the conflict, hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died on the battlefield or in makeshift hospitals or in prison camps ended up as lost bodies, in unidentified graves or no grave at all. Bodies became severed from their names; or, in archival terms, the material object (the corpse) lost its metadata (the headboards or gravestones that physically linked the name of the dead to the bodily remains).
The crisis of the unknown dead was, therefore, an archival crisis, which resulted in the proliferation of new archives devoted to the common soldier. These included cenotaphs (empty tombs) and public monuments inscribed with names of the dead, on a scale never before seen. In this paper I will reflect on the process of following bodies and names through these myriad archives, a process greatly enhanced by digital tools. On an individual level the process looks much like family genealogy, but on a collective level the process speaks to cultural shifts linked to evolving concepts of family, nation, and sacrifice.
Kirk Savage is a professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published widely on public monuments in the U.S. for the past thirty years. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton, 1997) and Monument Wars: Washington D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (University of California, 2009).
After experimenting with photomatch multiple times, I realized it may not be the best method for assembling this venue because it would not show the details of the side panels as accurately as I had hoped. So, I started over and began building it from scratch. I hope to facet photos of the panels onto the walls once I build the arches along the ceiling that frame the mural.
June has been a relaxing month for me, but I must admit that I have not been focusing on the SEP project this month! This is why I did not update the blog on 06/15. However, I will get going again this month and hopefully have the project just about finished one month from now. By the middle of July, I will hopefully figure out how to post some pictures of my progress to the blog! I am excited to get working on the project once again.
One wouldn't think that when searching for images that a singular word could make a difference in the search results---but it does. Mexico of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow was how I first learned the name of Diego Rivera's mural in the Palacio Nacional of Mexico City. However, my results in ArtStor were quite limited with that title. So I tried "Diego Rivera" which brought an overwhelming number of results and then I added the dates of the mural's construction to the search bar. I finally came upon an image showing a panel of the mural and it was titled History of Mexico. After searching that title, I found more results, some of them being preliminary sketches of Rivera's which had the title History of Mexico: From the Conquest to the Future. Each title I searched brought about different results even though the titles were for the same mural. Finding the images to work with was half the battle due to the immensity of this work and the architectural structures that frame it. Recently, I have been working with separate images in SketchUp to get an understanding of the shape of the building and the staircase to see how I should go about making a 3D model.