Tag: decorative arts

Includes the site banner and navigation links, as well as partial images of several completed crafts. "Thank you to our workshop and tutorial participants for sending in photos of their Crafting Communities projects!"

Crafting Communities

Virginia Kerr

Reviewed by:
Anna Flinchbaugh, PhD Student
University of Southern California
a.m.flinchbaugh@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.17613/k7t3-yn98

In the spring of 2020, when many felt untethered by the COVID-19 pandemic, Crafting Communities emerged to address this alienation by “enabling hands-on learning in a hands-off context” within the field of Victorian material culture, as the site notes. From a pilot program of two online events, the project has expanded to comprise further roundtables and online discussions, craft workshops and tutorials, an online exhibition, a podcast, and additional written resources. More than two years on, the site continues to provide a vibrant home for resources and discussions about Victorian material culture.

The litany of components which make up Crafting Communities comprise a combination of digital resources, online events, and documentation to support offline crafting. The online events might be thought of as Crafting Communities’ catalyst and core. Unfortunately, recordings of these are not included; the Events page simply provides a list of past and future offerings. However, indirect documentation exists in many of the site’s other components. Several of the tutorials on the Create page, including hair art and broderie anglaise (a needlework technique featuring cut-out eyelets), were originally presented in real-time workshops. All of the objects in the Victorian Things online exhibition (found via the Learn page), were discussed first in either a roundtable discussion or an episode of the Victorian Samplings podcast (also located on the Learn page). Someone interested in hair art might, therefore, lament having missed the real-time workshops held in 2020, but still find images of contemporary projects, detailed instructions on how to create their own works, and a thoroughly described historical object on various pages across the site.

This complex interweaving and productive redundancy of content makes Crafting Communities a richly multisensory, multimodal project. Varied forms of engagement are persistently integrated within the individual site components. For instance,  citations within  the object records in Victorian Things (an online exhibition) reference not only “Suggested Reading” but also “Selected Viewing” and “Selected Listening.” Within the craft tutorials, images, written descriptions, and videos overlap to create clear and accessible instructions for makers with a wide range of experience and confidence levels. Slightly frustratingly, the videos,while hosted on YouTube, must be accessed through the individual tutorials rather than  listed together on the Crafting Communities YouTube page.

Text titled “Activity 3: Calling card page” followed by a four panel instructional illustration. The panels have teal borders and feature a black and white hand holding a fancy pen. The introduction to the activity reads: “Victorians often left calling cards for their hosts as mementos of social visits (people would display trays full of calling cards as a measure of their social circle). Calling cards were also pasted into scrapbooks. Alternatively, scrapbookers would trace shapes onto a page and have friends and family sign their names in the shapes to make them look like calling cards.” This is followed by a list of materials and five steps. The materials are: blank book, pencil and black pen, scissors, cut out calling card from handout (or business card/credit card). The steps are: 1. Place your card anywhere on the blank page and trace around it in pencil. 2. Pick up your card and place it again in a way that overlaps with the existing trace. 3. Repeat until your page is full of overlapping calling card shapes. 4. Outline with pen. 5. Ask your friends and family to sign a “calling card”!
A section of the Victorian Scrapbooking online tutorial created by Ruth Ormiston

For all the thoughtful ways in which information is duplicated and connected, the largest drawback of Crafting Communities is that the site has limited navigation capabilities. Adding features such as filtering the list of events by type, and linking directly from an object record to the relevant podcast episode would considerably reduce the scrolling currently required. Furthermore, there is a gallery of work submitted  by participants in the workshops and tutorials, with no identifying information accompanying the images. In short, the current site navigation is intuitive, but not efficient.

With its emphasis on richness of connectivity over technological innovation, Crafting Communities is perhaps better understood as a community to join than a resource to draw upon, aimed at a broad range of interests. Much of the content (especially the Victorian Samplings podcast) emphasizes research methodologies and pedagogy, making it valuable for researchers and educators within and beyond Victorian studies. With its concise presentation of information and extensive links to further resources, the Victorian Things online exhibition could provide a helpful starting point for student projects. Finally, the workshops and craft tutorials are appealing to anyone who enjoys making, whether within an academic context or not.

Twelve labeled thumbnail images arranged in a grid on a white background. The objects shown are: William Moon's "Reading for the Blind" Primer, Miniature Portrait of Elizabeth Siddall, Charlotte Brontё’s “Little Book”, J. M. Whistler's "The Fleet: Monitors", Mrs. Alexander's Mark; The "Ladies Carpet", Hannah Claus's "interlacings", The Brontë Family's Broken Hair Bracelet, Kate Greenaway's Design for Nursery Wallpaper, Clemence Housman's "The Were-Wolf", Amelia Wood's Conversation Tube & Pouch, and William Macready & Charles Dickens's Scrap Screen.
Objects in the Victorian Things online exhibition

Crafting Communities is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Reflecting the diverse community supported by the project, organizers from three Canadian universities have recruited a wide range of contributors, including contemporary artists, librarians, and undergraduate students as well as established academics. As the project continues to grow (the second podcast season began in late July), it seems likely that the network woven by Crafting Communities will become still more varied and vibrant.  

Bloomsbury Applied Visual Arts

Alexandra Provo

Reviewed by:
Jack O’Malley, Metadata Lead
Frick Art Reference Library
omalley@frick.org
https://doi.org/10.17613/xs0w-8e05

Bloomsbury Applied Visual Arts, a library of 170 titles published by Bloomsbury Publishing, aims to provide students in the visual arts with practically minded resources for inspiration, technical advice, and career development. The digital resource library is organized according to major visual arts disciplines: fashion and textiles, design and illustration, photography, film and animation, architecture and interiors, and marketing and advertising. Within each discipline there are a number of “Basics” and “Fundamental” series, fit for practitioners of all levels. More intermediate resources include both hands-on exercises and more theoretical “required reading”, as well as instruction on career management.

The homepage of Bloomsbury Applied Visual Arts

Individual pages (also serving as subject guides) further break down the disciplines into a number of sub-topics. At a glance, these pages communicate the key areas covered by the resources. The “Explore Key Topics” side-panel brings users to an index of chapters tagged by topic, while the links at the bottom of the page bring users to entire e-books. Users can otherwise only see a list of e-books by turning to the “Browse Books” page, which lacks the filtering features users can apply to chapters. The search feature also indexes by chapter with filters available to narrow down searches by key topic. Both the key topics side-panel and the search bar bring users to the same results, but the advantage of the search feature comes primarily from full-text searches of chapters.

The Bloomsbury core disciplines.
The Film and Animation discipline page.

The books and chapters themselves are excellently rendered, with (according to Bloomsbury) 150–250 full color images per title, the option for personal download of chapters via the print button, and a smooth and functional full-screen viewer. On mobile, many of these features are diminished by layout changes and screen size, but all the content remains available. Many chapters contain further sub-sections captured in a side-panel table of contents, which facilitates use of these resources as reference material. The contents accurately reflect the resource’s commitment to providing granular, practical introductions for new to intermediate students in the visual arts. The titles take nothing for granted when explaining how to point a camera or craft a portfolio. 

The page view for a chapter of the book The Fundamentals of Digital Photography. 

The resources in Bloomsbury Applied Visual Arts have been aptly selected for the target audience of visual learners, especially for students who may want to frequently refer to reference material in a specific chapter as they move through the learning process. Delivering these titles digitally makes sense for the same reason, especially given the quality of the digital titles. The limitations of the search and browse features can make discovery more difficult than necessary, but it is still possible to consistently find the right resource. Bloomsbury also adds new resources on a regular basis. Applied Visual Arts also supplies the title list as an Excel Sheet, which has some additional metadata and may aid collection development selectors in evaluating the resource.

Librarians interested in the benefits of Bloomsbury Applied Visual Arts, such as facilitation of self-learning, explicit focus on applied basics, and breadth of coverage, will have to balance them with the financial cost. Although Bloomsbury offers a free thirty day trial, institutions will ultimately need to request a quote and pay to secure ongoing access for their users. Bloomsbury does not provide general pricing information. Comparable open-access resources include MERLOT, Open Textbook Library, and other introductory titles in the library catalog, among others available online, and librarians will need to choose between curating resources that fit their students’ needs with the broad coverage and disciplinary topics of this resource.

Nautilus Catalogue

Alexandra Provo

Reviewed by:
lauren c. molina, Digital Assets and Records Manager
Autry Museum of the American West
lauren.c.molina@gmail.com
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/g7p5-bc33

The aim of Nautilus Catalogue is to provide a database of Nautilus pompilius shells-turned-art object by aggregating information from a variety of disparate collections – and it does exactly this. Created by independent art historian Marsley Kehoe, Nautilus Catalogue consists of a web-based database and downloadable dataset that expands on on Hanns-Ulrich Mette’s 1995 catalogue of nautilus shells.

Text from the ‘About Shells and Mounts’ page of Nautilus Catalogue which lists common terminology terms in bolded text and following each term, defines the common term as used within the website

Kehoe explains the Nautilus Catalogue in detail on three of the resource’s five web pages. Most helpful of all are the “Common terminology” (NautilusCatalogue_3.png) section of the “About Nautilus Shells and Mounts” page and the “How to use this Catalogue” page in its entirety. Reading the text at both of the aforementioned pages makes the experience of using this resource more meaningful (although it is not at all required).

Three records and thumbnail images displayed on Nautilus Catalogue which were returned when searching for ‘coral, figure’ in the search bar under the main menu at the left of the page.

Built with WordPress and Omeka by importing CSV data, the Nautilus Catalogue successfully achieves what Kehoe has set out to do. This free resource displays true to itself across devices and browsers. It is unfettered by any special media viewers that might otherwise make it difficult to translate from desktop to handheld device, giving the user freedom of continued access from any place. There is an easy and effective search bar below the menu panel of this site, which allows the visitor to explore the items of this digital collection using one or many terms (NautilusCatalogue_1.png). The home page does not immediately present image(s) before the user begins their journey by navigating to the “Browse Items” page or by dreaming up a search term to find an item. This site is heavy with text to assert its purpose; text that reads easily, yet at its length may feel somewhat overwhelming to a visitor favoring the image. However lengthy the text is, it informs the user what can be found within Nautilus Catalogue, how to find it, and why it is presented. While this reviewer wonders if a more image-dominant web design might benefit the resource (perhaps with images inserted within the body of the text on the home page), the textual data found within provides detailed information pertaining to each nautilus object, which may be more relevant to audiences aligned with Kehoe’s own scholarship as an art historian. Most entertaining of Kehoe’s decisions with this resource is the choice to include a word cloud within the “Browse by Tag” section on the “Browse Items” page where terms are shown at scale. The word cloud (NautilusCatalogue_2.png) visualizes the catalogue when individual records may still lack images of the objects themselves to view. The word cloud also reveals that stripping shells, whether selectively or wholly, is a common practice in the creation of these objects.

Text which has been assembled into a word cloud that can be seen by clicking on the ‘Browse by Tag’ tab on the ‘Browse Items’ page of Nautilus Catalogue

A variety of audiences may benefit from this resource: curators, collectors, history scholars, and shell and oddities enthusiasts. Nautilus Catalogue is Kehoe’s attempt to “make sense” of this broadly collected and somewhat obscure type of object. It is an interesting starting place to begin to consider some of the motives behind the European fascination with exoticism and ornament, or museological histories, or specialized crafts, or a number of other reasons why this specific kind of object was made, prized, utilized, and/or presented. Despite (and perhaps because) Nautilus Catalogue is a very pared down, straight-forward resource, it has the promise of being a site where historical, conservational, art, and cultural research might converge upon these curious items.