We’re excited to announce the June 2024 issue of Multimedia & Technology Reviews. Follow the links from each title below or click the DOI link directly to read the reviews. You can find more of our reviews in the ARLIS/NA Commons CORE Repository.
Artstor on Jstor
Artstor is a not-for-profit that emerged in the 1990s as a response to a need to migrate analog slide collections into digital formats. With millions of images from institutions worldwide, Artstor has content spanning cultures and periods. The Artstor website will be retired as of August 1, 2024 and the content has been migrated to the JSTOR platform. This new experience will combine cross-disciplinary content onto one platform. JSTOR offers scholarship and primary resources, which can now be discovered, saved, compared, and presented alongside Artstor’s image collections. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/08h6-nq46
BASIRA: Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art
BASIRA (Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art) is a cross-disciplinary resource that identifies and describes thousands of images of books and other textual documents in the figurative arts between approximately 1300 and 1600 CE. The site unites the history of art and print media during the period when moveable type and the printing press facilitated the final important advance of books as knowledge containers, and is an outstanding model of digital humanities. The site bridges visual and material culture. Analyzing the symbolic role of bound and unbound documents in paintings, it reveals how these forms amplify the act of looking by drawing the viewer’s attention to the internal life of individuals observing, holding, or reading books. At the same time, intriguingly, the site flips the usual relationship between word and image. Whereas the verbal is typically a means of analyzing the visual, here a visual form provides information about a verbal one, drawing the user’s attention to what can be learned about the materiality of the depicted books and other documents. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/f3h3-gm37
Digital Florentine Codex
Digital Florentine Codex is a unique resource for scholars at all levels, allowing free public access to and engagement with this encyclopedic work documenting Aztec life in 1500s Mexico. No doubt this resource will inspire a new audience for this remarkable historic work, and enable users to make new connections and explore this treasure trove of content in countless ways. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/zx2w-p982
Perspectives on Data
Perspectives on Data, published as a digital book by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022, “explores the potentials and pitfalls of using data-oriented approaches in art, art history, and museums.” Articles focus on the choices involved in metadata creation and data translation. While especially applicable to professionals creating and managing metadata, these arguments are relevant to any user of information retrieval systems, stressing the notion that since humans shape data, data necessarily embodies human values. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/n9vf-xw05