2024 – ARLIS/NA Multimedia & Technology Reviews

December 2024

December - 2024December - 2024 Abigail Walker

We’re excited to announce the December 2024 issue of Multimedia & Technology Reviews. Follow the links in the images below or click the DOI link directly to read the reviews. You can find the full backlist of our reviews in the ARLIS/NA Commons CORE Repository.

Landing page of the database with search filters at left. — The Art Collection of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture

The page includes links to the archive and maps sections, plus opportunities to get involved. An engraving shows enslaved persons working as blacksmiths. — The Art Collection of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture

The VDB home page, featuring rows of video thumbnails below a menu. — Video Data Bank Educational Streaming Platform

The Art Collection of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture

Reviewed by: Emily Stein

The Art Collection of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture is a database presenting
the holdings of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, housed at the Louvre in Paris, in 1715 and 1781. It accumulates records for 653 fine and decorative art objects acquired by the Academy and enables the user to curate one’s own experience in French or in English, providing a singular resource for anyone researching eighteenth century French art and institutions. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/ey97w-ev378

Black Craftspeople Digital Archive

Reviewed by: Hannah Fountain

Through the power of primary source documents, the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive (BCDA)
seeks to enhance knowledge of the Black craftspeople who produced much of the American South’s prized goods and wares from 1619 on. Archival materials cited in the database are largely sourced from historic newspapers and U.S. Census data, focused on craftspeople working in South Carolina and Tennessee during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/g2k24-1t004

Common Dimensions

Reviewed by: Fiona Hibbard

Common Dimensions is a unique platform dedicated to investigating the expressions of the chair as an object of study. This primarily online resource also offers a print publication by the same name. Each modality examines what makes a chair a chair. Common Dimensions is a predominantly digital resource, and has a variety of content including a visual archive, interviews, and a collection of text. Through these resources, users are encouraged to explore the material, cultural, and political dimensions of the chair. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/7fgwq-t5321

Fragmentarium

Reviewed by: Friedrich Sarah E. Thompson

Fragmentarium is an online repository for digitized medieval manuscript fragments run by the
Manuscript Research Centre at the University of Fribourg. Unlike many other online platforms for
digitized manuscripts (like DigiVatLib, RIALFrI, or DIAMM), Fragmentarium’s focus is on manuscripts that exist only in fragmentary form, regardless of origin or host institution. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/4xn7x-hc645

Hammer Online Collections

Reviewed by: Maya Lekach

Hammer Online Collections is a free digital resource from the Hammer Museum at UCLA, which
provides public access to the museum’s diverse holdings and data. The resource provides access to
roughly 50,000 works from the museum’s collection including over 8,000 open-source images as well as video recordings of past artist programs. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/j22cs-hbd22

Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture

Reviewed by: Stephanie Morgan

The Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture databases for Tuscany, Lombardy and Piedmont, and Puglia and Basilicata hosted by Queen’s University form an extensive, ongoing project to document
Renaissance and Baroque polychrome sculptures in Italy. Each database contains high-resolution
photographs, interactive maps, and detailed information for over 600 sculptures in total, offering
scholars, educators, and students valuable open-access resources. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/nzq2t-c9882

Video Data Bank Educational Streaming Platform

Reviewed by: Garrett M. Rosenblum

The Video Data Bank Educational Streaming Platform is a new subscription-based resource from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) Video Data Bank (VDB). VDB has been a leading resource for videos by and about artists since 1976. Their vast collections include over 6,000 titles of video art, experimental films, documentaries, and artist interviews, showcasing artworks from 1970 to the present. VDB’s Streaming Platform currently provides access to over 2,000 titles from this collection. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/7m7jg-9xd82

September 2024

September - 2024October - 2024 Virginia Kerr

We’re excited to announce the September 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 the full backlist of our reviews in the ARLIS/NA Commons CORE Repository.

Home page of the library guide — **All Aspects of Color Resources**

Home page of Bloomsbury Fashion Central with an About description — **All Aspects of Color Resources**

All Aspects of Color Resources, a Research Guide

Reviewed by: Michele Jennings

New York Public Library’s All Aspects of Color Resources research guide–attributed to Arezoo Moseni at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library–provides an excellent starting point for researchers of historical, theoretical, psychological, and technical aspects of color. It mostly features print books from NYPL’s circulating collections, with a page dedicated to online resources ranging from ebooks to museums and foundations dedicated to artists and designers known for exploration of color. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/w6k6-cs52

Bloomsbury Dress and Costume Library

Reviewed by: Hailey Joannah Byrd

Launched in June of 2023, Bloomsbury Dress and Costume Library is the newest addition to Bloomsbury’s Fashion Central collection that features resources across the fields of costume history, making, and design. The library is focused on an interdisciplinary and object-based approach to historical fashion research, a practice that has been rising in popularity. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/5qkw-7c55

Fashion Calendar Research Database

Reviewed by: Erin Carney

The Fashion Calendar Research Database (FCRD) is a digitized archive showcasing the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Ruth Finley Collection, an extensive archive which includes her publications Fashion Calendar, Home Furnishings Calendar, and Fashion International. Published between 1941 and 2014, these periodicals document decades of fashion and design history. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/7dtd-rc65

Glossary of Early Modern Popular Print Genres

Reviewed by: Bridget O’Keefe

The Glossary of Early Modern Popular Print Genres identifies and describes terms related to European print culture between 1500-1900. The digital glossary encompasses terms in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. This state-of-the-art database foregrounds both the materiality and the intellectual content of Early Modern Print culture, illuminating historical knowledge dissemination and cultural exchange. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/texp-n256

International Dunhuang Programme

Reviewed by: Ann Bell

The revamped International Dunhuang Programme (IDP) website unifies digital resources from 35 partner institutions worldwide to enhance appreciation of the history and culture of the Eastern Silk Roads. In the early 1900s Mogao Cave 17, sealed for nearly 1000 years, was discovered near Dunhuang, an oasis town serving as a major nucleus of trade and religion along China’s Silk Road. In addition to textiles, paintings, and small wooden statues, thousands of manuscripts quickly earned the grotto the informal title of “Library Cave.” In 1994, the International Dunhuang Programme (IDP) formed, collaborating to catalog, conserve, and promote scholarly research of the Silk Road. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/b8d9-md21

MoCDA Museum of Contemporary Digital Art

Reviewed by: Maria Ketcham

Museum of Contemporary Digital Art (MoCDA), established in 2019, is an online museum of digital works that serves to promote the understanding, enjoyment, preservation and protection of digital art. Their website showcases digital art selected “from a representative and diverse group of digital artists that are deemed the best of historical and contemporary art,” and offers a wealth of information on a variety of artists working in digital formats. Most of the work featured is NFT art. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/cwxp-rc81

June 2024

May - 2024May - 2024 Abigail Walker

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

April 2024

April - 2024April - 2024 Karina Wratschko

We’re excited to announce the April 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.

Artforum Archive

The Artforum Archive is a sophisticated digital platform which provides access to the backfile of one the most influential magazines in the contemporary art world. The archive encompasses art across disciplinary boundaries, from painting to video art, in addition to “reviews and features relating to artists, exhibitions, publications,” dating back to the magazine’s launch in 1962. The state of the art database comprises over 100,000 pages of art, criticism, and cultural commentary–preserving, contextualizing and providing access to work that spans decades, regions and cultural forms within a centralized platform. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/08h6-nq46

Artists’ Publications Lab

Launched in February 2023, the Artists’ Publications Lab (APL) provides virtual, interactive access to items collected by the Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst. The Centre’s collection is focused on post-war European artists’ publications, comprising over 300,000 items; the APL includes only a limited selection of the Centre’s holdings at this time, though it is planned to be continually added to. Despite this limitation, the APL is remarkable as a dynamic and visually browsable tool, augmenting the capabilities of the Centre’s pre-existing online database search tool. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/f3h3-gm37

Electronic Arts Intermix

The Electronic Arts Intermix Educational Streaming Site is a subscription-access resource featuring full-length streaming video and media art from the New York City-based non-profit of the same name. The collection spans from the mid-60s to the present and is considered one of the most comprehensive and exclusively focused video and media art and artist collections in the world. It includes works by seminal pioneering as well as emerging artists. Their commitment to preservation and exhibition of video art, as stated on their site, is evidenced in their online catalogue, a comprehensive web resource on the artists and works in the collection. The streaming site allows for more in-depth user engagement with the primary source materials, ideas, and histories collected by the organization and is optimized for personal use or for academic presentation. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/xe14-h995

Fashion and Race Database

The Fashion and Race Database (FRD) is an educational platform that focuses on illuminating discourse around fashion’s intersection with racialized groups, historically and current, considering both its impact on and by these marginalized communities. The scope of FRD encompasses components that include a library of aggregated resources listings and several projects of original content including essays and current event pieces, an encyclopedia of objects and profiles, a podcast, and exhibition and events listings. The FRD is founded by Kimberly M. Jenkins, a fashion lecturer and historian. It is continually updated and added to by a small team of researchers and contributors, most with backgrounds in fashion studies. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/22b8-0148

Mapping Color in History

Mapping Color in History (MCH) is an interdisciplinary digital humanities project that seeks to trace the appearance of specific hues in Asian paintings temporally and geographically. With a focus on South Asian and Himalayan art, MCH joins scientific data from pigment studies with historical information about individual works of art. In addition to hosting a searchable database, MCH provides clear documentation about its methodologies, processes, and conceptual foundations. Founded in 2018 at Harvard University, MCH is led by Professor Jinah Kim (Principal Investigator/Project Director). The project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as several funding sources at Harvard University. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/4n45-xb19

Sculpting Harmony

Sculpting Harmony is a digital exhibit telling the story of how Walt Disney Concert Hall (WDCH) in Los Angeles, California was designed and built by architect Frank Gehry. Hosted by the Getty Research Institute, the site offers an immersive experience told in ‘chapters’ with audio and visual elements. To develop the story, Getty selected 171 highlights from the Frank Gehry Papers held in its archive and provided guided narration through interviews, drone footage, and photographs. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/397t-3×13