Blogs

Recently, I have taken some time to explore the changes made to medart’s menu page for England (menuengland). Some of the most drastic changes to medart occurred on this page. In the earliest snapshot we have of menuengland from 12.25.1996 the user had to navigate to the images they wanted through a map. The user had to click on the location of whichever monument they wanted images of. They did have a link to an alphabetic site list one could choose as an alternative to the map.

In my last blog-post, I touched on a potential method to study neuroesthetics by first analyzing the specific characteristics of some artwork using Adobe Photoshop. While I have continued to look at possible ways to quantify artwork characteristics, I first decided on a methodology. I plan on using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online-based method designed to get human subject input.

Since starting on Itinera, I've focused on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an 18th-Century aristocrat and poet. Specifically, I focus on her tour from London, through Eastern Europe, and into Istanbul with her hubsband, the English ambassador to Turkey. As her introduction reads:

Museum Studies Intern at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History - Fall 2016       

Located on the second floor of CMNH, adjacent to the North American Wildlife Section, the Hall of Botany seems like a forgotten space by the museum. Initially, I was unsure if I would find a story that genuinely interested me.  I had no idea of the wealth of research avenues that would peak my interests.

With the help of Matt Burton we were able to successfully extract metadata from the medart folders via unix commands. We have since imported that data into an excel spreadsheet from which we have begun analyzing and organizing our findings. I have been specifically looking at when which directories were most frequently modified and which file types were used most prominently.

Finally, after much hard work, deliberation, investigation, and play ourselves, the Museum Studies Exhibition Seminar class is proud to present our final exhibition, Paradoxes of Play: Conrete and Conceptualist Proposals from Brazil and Beyond! Here are a few pictures from our opening reception this past Friday. Come out and experience it for yourself at the UAG from now until December 9, Monday-Friday 10am-4pm.

Museum Studies Intern at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History - Fall 2016

Alison Langmead has embarked on outreach efforts to connect the VMW with other digital humanities spaces, beginning with our colleagues in the US, but soon hoping to move more internationally. We are looking forward to all of the opportunities this will provide, and are perceiving a future where the question is less "what can computers do for the study of material culture," and more, "what shall we do today?”

Hello!

For the last  couple of weeks on the Sustaining MedArt project I have focused on compiling what I have learned from comparing MedArt with MedArt-2014 in addition to continuing to work with BitCurator.