digital humanities – ARLIS/NA Multimedia & Technology Reviews

June 2026

June - 2026June - 2026 Matthew Garklavs

We’re pleased to announce the release of the June 2026 issue of Multimedia & Technology Reviews!

The June 2026 issue of M&TR highlights digital resources that were originally supported by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). In light of the significant cuts affecting this federal agency, M&TR invited reviewers to reflect on the impact of federal funding on libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions through the examples listed below.

We encourage you to explore the current reviews by following the DOI links provided and join the conversation on how technology continues to shape the future of art and cultural heritage. You can also browse the full archive of our reviews on the ARLIS/NA Commons CORE Repository.

Archives Research Compute Hub

Reviewed by: Raeshelle Cooke

The Archives Research Compute Hub (ARCH) is an open-source platform for research and teaching that allows users to work with large digital collections using computational methods. The website is set up to include high quality datasets (collections, pdfs, images, full text, network visualizations, speech, and other file formats) from sites like Archive.org, Wayback Machine, and Vault, etc.; these datasets can immediately be used for analysis and research. ARCH allows researchers and teachers to access various archival collections across the internet, develop and disseminate datasets, and receive technical support when they need it.
See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/1vsy4-hsj30

The COVID-19 Web Archive

Reviewed by: Patrick Cassidy

The COVID-19 Web Archive lists over 70,000 websites, maintained through the Internet Archive’s “Archive-It”, (commonly known as the Way Back Machine), and grouped into various topical “collections” that attempt to record these events. The web resources were originally documented by other libraries, archives, and cultural heritage organizations in order to archive the changing data, the creative works, and general responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services American Rescue Plan grant program, these resources are now retrievable via a searchable database.

See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/n0w2t-sab97

En Foco

Reviewed by: Stephanie Morgan

The En Foco website presents a comprehensive digital platform dedicated to supporting and amplifying the work of U.S.-based photographers of African, Asian, Latino, Native American, and Pacific Islander heritage. Founded in 1974, En Foco functions as both an advocacy organization and a cultural archive, offering access to exhibitions, publications, and digitized resources that document the contributions of historically underrepresented artists. Through its website, En Foco brings together exhibitions, publications, fellowships, and archival resources, positioning itself as both a support structure for artists and a resource for research and teaching.

See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/60r74-5ws61

Ashbery Resource Center/The Flow Chart Foundation

Reviewed by: Eleanor Morgan

The Ashbery Resource Center (ARC) is the library and special collections of the Flow Chart Foundation, a private operating foundation based in Hudson, New York, that stewards the personal archives of the poet John Ashbery. The ARC’s comprehensive collection of Ashbery’s influential creative work and biographical information is freely available to browse via its online catalog.

See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/tnyhq-h7835

Princeton Art Museum

Reviewed by: Mikayla Bryant

The Princeton University Art Museum is an academically based, public facing institution whose ethos is to challenge the students at Princeton University and members of the diverse local, national, and international publics through exposure to the world of art. With a grant received through the Institute of Museum and Library Studies, The Princeton University Art Museum created a site that does a fantastic job in creating evocative programming and interactive shows.

See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/naa3x-jh220

Queens Memory Project

Reviewed by: Beth Mawhinney

The Queens Memory Project is a community archiving initiative that collects personal histories, photographs, ephemera, and records of contemporary life in Queens, New York. A collaboration between the Queens Public Library and Queens College, the initiative functions as a hub that brings together a range of platforms and activities, including its website, interactive tools, oral history and personal archiving events, and access points to collection materials through digital archives and audiovisual platforms. It is designed to both build collections and engage the community in contributing to and shaping a shared historical record.

See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/4kw76-f8j22

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library & Archives

Reviewed by: Chelsea L. Gizzi

In 2012, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s Library & Archives opened in a newly-constructed building shared with Cuyahoga Community College. By making accessible a collection about “the people, events, and songs that shape our world,” this repository of over 30,000 items realizes the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s wider mission of teaching and inspiring visitors through “the power of rock and roll.”

See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/rqeq0-ppe34

The Poet’s House

Reviewed by: Isabelle Sakelaris

Poets House, a specialized poetry library and community space, has recently updated its online catalog, making all of its library materials acquired since 2012 searchable online for the first time. Previously acquired materials are also being added to the online catalog on an ongoing basis, along with new acquisitions. The general collection spans centuries of poetry, including works in translation, as well as works in languages other than English. Poets House also maintains multiple special collections, such as an extensive collection of chapbooks, a broadsides collection, and its digital archive.

See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/hw7yf-2js49

Welo Hou – Bishop Museum

Reviewed by: Jacquelyn H. Clements

Welo Hou is a blog produced by the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum to document an historic collection of mele, which are Hawaiian chants, songs, and poems. This resource was funded in part by a 2017 Native Hawaiian Library Services Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), acknowledged on the right column of each blog post.

See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/x88nx-46m21

June 2025

June - 2025June - 2026 Matthew Garklavs

We’re pleased to announce the release of the June 2025 issue of Multimedia & Technology Reviews (MTR), now available online.

This issue explores the timely and resonant theme of Preserving Cultural Heritage, a topic MTR has addressed in depth across previous issues. We invite you to explore the current reviews by following the links in the images below or by using the DOI link provided.

You can also browse the full archive of our reviews on the ARLIS/NA Commons CORE Repository.

As part of this theme, we’re highlighting a few past reviews that remain especially relevant. Here are some honorable mentions we encourage you to revisit:

Digital Benin
Mapping Philippine Material Culture
Missouri Remembers, Artists in Missouri through 1951
¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now
Visualizing the Virus

Archive of Destruction

Reviewed by: Bridget O’Keefe

The Archive of Destruction is an idiosyncratic digital repository that presents histories of public art and narratives around the concept of destruction. The creators characterize the resource as a global collection of modern and contemporary artwork, showcasing narratives of ‘vulnerability, interference, rage, fear, boredom, and love. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/0x8h0-gs125

Cultural gems

Reviewed by: Campbell Garland

Begun in 2018, Cultural gems functions as a map application mapping out monuments, historical sites, and cultural institutions within the European Union. This site is run by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, an organization focused on promoting scientific research and collaboration. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/bgj5v-ee815

Cultures in Crisis

Reviewed by: Carol Ng-He

Culture in Crisis is a free digital portal developed by the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) that records heritage protection projects from around the world. Launched in December 2019, the portal is considered to be the world’s largest and most accessible database on the subject.See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/2b0es-z5879

Digital Transgender Archive

Reviewed by: Leo Krakowsky

The Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is a key resource for primary research in queer and trans studies. The scope of its content and usage is timely and important in the current political climate, with applicability to a variety of library patrons. The DTA’s interface is clean and easy to understand, with impressive functionalities for search. Whether the user has an extensive background in transgender studies and topics, or is just beginning to familiarize themselves with this field, this resource’s content is offered in a clear and findable format. Particularly, the glossaries and lesson-planning guides are informative and helpful. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/p5bcv-hxm16

dPlan|ArtsReady

Reviewed by: Carrie B. Evans

dPlan|ArtsReady is an emergency preparedness tool designed to help arts and cultural heritage organizations assess their disaster response plans, identify areas for improvement, retrieve important documents, and access expert resources. The platform can serve a range of organizations and is available in free or paid versions. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/9vhvc-wsf26

Lost Art Database

Reviewed by: Stephanie Morgan

The Lost Art Database, developed by the German Lost Art Foundation, is a publicly accessible digital platform dedicated to documenting cultural property that was expropriated due to Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945, or displaced as a result of World War II. The site contains thousands of entries, divided into Search Requests for missing cultural assets and Found-Object Reports for those that may have problematic provenance. The resource serves as a tool for restitution efforts and provenance research. It is designed to benefit scholars, institutions, and individuals seeking to trace displaced objects or claim lost heritage. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/g1542-btv17

Museum of Looted Antiquities

Reviewed by: Samie Konet

The Museum of Looted Antiquities (MoLA) is a virtual gallery dedicated to the intricacies of tracing the smuggling, looting, purchase, and eventual return of antiquities repatriated since 1950. With contributions from community members–academics, lawyers, museum professionals–MoLA presents a comprehensive collection of trafficked antiquities with over 100 publicly available entries. Created to consolidate documentation tracing an artifact’s journey from its looting to eventual repatriation, MoLA aspires to preserve all records of ownership and exchange of an object for future research. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/87qxg-82r44

NuevaYorkinos

Reviewed by: Laura Michael

A crowd-sourced digital archival initiative and multimedia project, NuevaYorkinos depicts everyday histories through photographs of Caribbean and Latino people living in all five boroughs of New York. The resource consists of community submissions, and each photograph is often accompanied by a written story or memory from its owner. The purpose of this digital archive is to visually document the quotidian lives of Latinos in NYC through an overall ethos of community history and storytelling. NuevaYorkinos has a wide scope, inviting submissions of photos and videos dated before 2010 from anyone of Caribbean or Latino descent. On its website, the photographic archive is organized by borough. With over 1,000 entries, most contributions are concentrated in Manhattan, and are mainly from the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Founded by Djali Brown-Cepeda and Ricardo Castañeda, this multimedia project also includes virtual exhibitions, a free educational journal called Rooted, and in-person events. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/em8xc-nvb02

Queer Zine Archive Project

Reivewed by: Alex Austin

The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) is an online blog and archive that contains fully digitized and browsable zines about queer subjects, available free to the public. Behind the digitized collection lives a physical archive in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, though the website serves as the primary mode of access. QZAP describes their intended audience as, “other queers, researchers, historians, punks, and anyone else who has an interest [in] DIY publishing and underground queer communities.”
See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/83bj5-6ks19

Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online

Reviewed by: Ruth Thomas

In February of 2022, Russian forces invaded eastern Ukraine. Less than two weeks later, an initiative emerged on the internet, founded by digital historians, librarians, and archivists to protect culturally significant materials from Ukraine from being lost in the conflict: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO). With over 1,500 international volunteers contributing over 50TB of data, SUCHO aims to preserve digital and digitized records from Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions at risk of destruction due to war. With implications for those concerned with digital preservation, cultural memory, and post-custodial models of stewardship, SUCHO is a striking example of a responsive, community-driven archival initiative. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/xtg1e-ekq04

Sudan Memory

Reviewed by: Reinhardt Schuhmann

The Sudan Memory project is a digital collection that preserves and promotes cultural materials from and about Sudan. Begun in 2018, it’s a collaboration between Sudanese and international partners, including Sudaak, the National Records Office of Sudan, and King’s College London. Materials are sourced from public and private collections, many at risk of being lost due to the ongoing Sudanese civil war. Collections come from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, The National Records Office of Sudan, The Sudan Archeological Research Society, Tales of Jewish Sudan, and University of Khartoum. The platform offers a vast collection of digitized materials, including images, films, manuscripts, and oral histories, spanning over 6,000 years of Sudanese history. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/3w9qy-x9786

Talking Objects Archive

Reviewed by: Shira Atkinson

The Talking Objects Archive (TOA) includes objects from international museum collections in Europe and Africa. It is a publicly available, free resource newly launched on January 17, 2025, aimed at researchers and artists. The website is available to view in English, French and German. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/qy5s9-s7c82

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

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

March 2023 Issue

March - 2023March - 2024 Alexandra Provo

We’re excited to announce the March 2023 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.

MoMA Exhibition Spelunker

MoMA Exhibition Spelunker is a portal for exploring the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition history. Originally taken from a large dataset of information from the archives, the company Good Form and Spectacle, transformed MOMA exhibition history from 1929-1989 into a user-friendly portal for deep engagement. https://doi.org/10.17613/6az8-8049

John Henry Twachtman Catalogue Raisonné

The John Henry Twachtman Catalogue Raisonné by Lisa N. Peters is an authoritative, extensively researched resource documenting the life and works of the American Impressionist painter John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902). https://doi.org/10.17613/zsz4-4×98

Duchamp Research Portal

The Duchamp Research Portal is a free, bilingual, online research tool to discover the life and work of Marcel Duchamp. The portal is the product of seven-year, international collaboration between the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bibliothèque Kandinsky at Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Association of Marcel Duchamp. https://doi.org/10.17613/mry9-hz66

OpenBibArt

Directed by Antoine Petit, Chief Executive Officer of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), OpenBibArt is a western bibliographic database covering art literature published between 1910 and 2007. The vast scope of subjects range from Late Antiquity to the 21st century, represented by 1.2 million records for periodicals, books, and exhibition and auction catalogs. https://doi.org/10.17613/dfmn-g607

Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook

Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook, created by art historians and digital media specialists Beth Fischer and Hannah Jacobs, provides two distinct offerings. The first is a handbook, a how-to guide that could work well as a course text about creating digital scholarship projects in the humanities. The second is a peer-reviewed and cross-reference-able repository of case studies and assignments. https://doi.org/10.17613/6t8a-0418

Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME)

The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) is a collaborative, free-access aggregator developed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), Stanford Libraries, and the Qatar National Library. https://doi.org/10.17613/1s43-0936

Smithsonian Voyager

Voyager is an open-source suite of tools for creating and displaying three-dimensional images. It was developed by the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office to serve as their 3D imaging pipeline and is available to the public. https://doi.org/10.17613/ztmx-pp34

The Living New Deal

October - 2022October - 2022 Alexandra Provo

Reviewed by:
Jennifer Tobias
Catalogue Raisonné/ Provenance Researcher
Roy Lichtenstein Foundation
jenny.tobias@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.17613/hq6c-3×22

By initiating “a national database of information, documents, photographs, and personal stories about the public works made possible by the New Deal,” The Living New Deal is building a comprehensive registry of projects completed between 1933 and 1942. Currently, over 17,000 entries represent “hundreds of thousands” of public works, from heroic murals to humble sewers, making it the only reference source of its kind.

Researching New Deal projects can be a challenge. Multiple agencies were involved, and the records are spread among federal repositories (National Park Service, National Archives, Library of Congress, and National Gallery of Art) as well as state and local agencies. Navigating these primary sources can be daunting, while secondary works tend to be either very broad or highly specific. Living New Deal edits this material into concise narratives organized geographically—much like the WPA American Guides series published under the Federal Writers’ Project.

For an average researcher, the Living New Deal website is a good place to get oriented to the era, with a companion iPhone app handy for searching on the move. Users will need to download the app directly from the Apple App Store, since no link is available on the website. Donation-driven, there is no paywall or account to create. The About section outlines the organizational structure and includes contributor biographies as well as annual reports.

The interface is basic: a simple header with seven categories and drop-down subsections supplemented by a keyword site search. For reference purposes –the focus here – the meatiest sections are Map & Sites and the confusingly titled The New Deal, which features substantive entries on programs as well as a timeline, glossary, and footnoted interpretive essays. The index of agencies is especially useful, as is another grouping projects into categories such as Historic Preservation and Labor Law. A timeline and list of landmark acts situate the programs in world events and domestic legislation. The biographies section features concise and sourced entries, with helpful cross-referencing to particular projects. Wikipedia and other sources (National Archives, DPLA, for example) cover many if not all of these topics, but Living New Deal provides welcome focus on material culture.

Map interface showing a beige map of the United States covered in dots representing New Deal Sites. On the left, a light yellow rectangle with search bar and a link back to the homepage is overlaid — *Living New Deal map interface*

Interactive mapping standards are getting higher by the day, but here the Mapbox and OpenStreetMap platforms work well enough, with standard click and zoom features, as well as searching by location (city, state, zipcode). Unfortunately, the standard search box includes unrelated locations and no artist index, making map searches indirect. This means that locating works such as the South Side Community Arts Center involves clicking through a state and city index, then manually paging through alphabetical listings.

A zoomed-in map view of Chicago streets shows South Side Community Arts Center’s location. On the left, a sidebar contains information about the center and a black and white photograph of a crowd of people — *Map view showing the South Side Community Arts Center location with text in sidebar.*

Another workaround: exit the map, do an advanced search, and click through the results to get back to the map. Moreover, the database structure includes categories for artist, contractor, and architect, but not engineer, photographer, or writer. Use of these fields appears to be up to the contributor, so that even if mentioned in the descriptive text, figures such as Hilyard Robinson or Louis Kahn are not indexed and therefore can only be found by keyword searching the whole site.For future iterations, the organizers might look to the integrated design of sites such as Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, and consider releasing Living New Deal as an open-source dataset to make the material portable, interlinkable, and open to wider interpretation. In the meantime, Living New Deal’s 17,000 entries are a unique and valuable compilation.

Visualizing the Virus

August - 2022August - 2022 Alexandra Provo

Reviewed by:
Dana Statton Thompson, Research and Instruction Librarian
Waterfield Library, Murray State University
dthompson29@murraystate.edu
https://doi.org/10.17613/56yv-b963

Visualizing the Virus is a cross between an online repository of original content and bibliography of existing resources. The purpose of the international and interdisciplinary project is to showcase both how the COVID-19 pandemic has been visualized and the inequalities it has revealed. The project was founded and is led by Dr Sria Chatterjee, an art historian and environmental humanities scholar who is the Head of Research and Learning at the Paul Mellon Centre in London. The project is made possible by a grant from DARIAH EU, support from the Institute of Experimental Design and Media, FHNW, and project partner Princeton Center for Digital Humanities. There are 75 individual contributors to the project so far with four ways to participate as an outsider: collaborating, curating a cluster, featuring existing work, and submitting new work.

This free-to-access project provides relevant information about 43 entries and counting, be it a summary of a podcast, explanation of artwork, or link to a peer-reviewed article. Entries range from original essays to summaries of other projects centered on visualization and the virus, are extremely diverse and include websites, films, poetry, and even a recorded conversation between two anthropologists with accompanying images. Each entry is included on the homepage and include such varied titles as “COVID-19 and Art in South Africa: The Voids of Thuli Lubisi’s Apart,” “Indian Migrant Workers & Lockdown: Trapped in the Inner Cities,”” “Smartphones and the Pandemic: Navigating care, surveillance, and Connection in Japan.” Some entries are linked through two different types of ‘clusters.’ A ‘curated cluster’ is a group of individual entries by different contributors which have been linked by theme by a member of the project team or a guest-curator. Currently, there are 4 curated clusters: White Privilege and Covid-19 (2 entries); Visualizing COVID-19 as a Zoonotic Disease (5 entries); Covid Denialism (5 entries); and Covid-19 in the Context of Protests in Hong Kong (3 entries). Each curated cluster includes an introduction by the curator introducing the connecting thread between the entries. Somewhat confusingly, there are also 50 ‘themed clusters’ which are entries that are linked by keywords applied to each entry such as activism, art, bats, capitalism, care, colonialism, data visualization, gender, labor, lockdown, public health, race, surveillance, and trauma.

The Index page can be organized in five different ways: alphabetically by title of the entry, by ‘macro-cluster’ (which refers to a keyword associated with the entry), by cluster (which refers to the entries organized into curated clusters), by date, and by contributor(s). The newly-introduced term ‘macro-cluster’ apparently refers to themed clusters which are broader in scope than intentionally-curated clusters, are not presented with any type of unifying context or introduction like the curated clusters, and are linked by keyword. .

Interestingly, the title of each entry on the homepage slowly circles the image representing the entry. Entries included in curated clusters bounce in between the confines of the image, also a stagnant image, also in the shape of a circle. It is possible to halt the motion of the animation by clicking the ‘Accessibility’ button included on the top right of each website page and selecting ‘No Motion.’ The Accessibility information included on the site states that they want as many people as possible to be able to site and includes inclusive practices such as alt text and navigating the site using speech recognition software. However, it is never clearly outlined why the animation is included, although the assumption is that since this is a project about visualization, movement creates its own type of interesting visual display.

Although several sites showcase visualizations about COVID-19 or have dashboards based on COVID-19 data, this site is singular in that it is a collection focused on COVID-19 and inequality and injustice. The project centers entries, either directly presented on the site or introduced and linked to about COVID-19’s impact, with a social justice lens. This resource is appropriate for the general public and serves as an excellent example of visually stimulating web design that foregrounds accessibility. However, the success of this is slightly minimized by the problematic navigation and naming conventions of the clusters.

Nautilus Catalogue

June - 2022June - 2022 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.

About Shells and Mounts page image — 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).

Search results page image — 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.

Browse by tag word cloud — 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.

Feral Atlas

April - 2022March - 2024 Gabriella Karl-Johnson

Reviewed by:
Nicholas Dease, Digital Learning Librarian
Pratt Institute Libraries
ndease@pratt.edu

ARLIS/NA Multimedia & Technology Reviews
April 2022
2474-6673
https://doi.org/10.17613/5qk0-hr06

The anthropocene, a new geological period defined by humanity’s indelible mark on nature, is a topic of great interest among scholars in various disciplines. One doesn’t need to look far to discover a wealth of literature, datasets, news articles, and documentaries exploring the topic. However, it is rare that we see attempts to capture this phenomena as a work of art in the digital humanities. Published online by Stanford University Press, Feral Atlas is an openly accessible experiment that does just that. It is at once a work of interactive digital art, a dense informational resource for researchers, and a passionate call to action.

An image from Feral Atlas, depicting a port scene, pollution, and protest.

Curated and edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, the Feral Atlas is a set of four massive interactive artworks or maps, seventy-nine field reports produced by humanists, artists and scientists, and a “Super Index” to enable a more traditional exploration of the essays, poems, and other multimedia content. As described in the introduction, its goal is to invite the user to explore the “feral effects” of the anthropocene–to explore the ways in which human interventions have produced effects beyond human control.

An image from Feral Atlas, depicting an interpretive view of colonization.

The experience of interacting with the atlas begins in an empty plane of white. Over time, a random selection of feral effects to explore drift into the browser viewport. Clicking on these effects will drop the user on one of the four maps, named Invasion, Empire, Capital, and Acceleration. From there, the user is invited to explore the map by panning, zooming, and clicking on feral effects represented by interactive dots or pins. Clicking on the dots reveals a “Tipper.” These are rich and often poetic descriptions of ecological changes that “shift ecologies past tipping points.” Viewing the tipper content provides a direct link to a field report that describes the effect in-depth and may reveal additional poetry, video, or other multimedia.

While the overall experience should be familiar to users that have navigated online interactive maps, the atlas itself is quite opaque at first blush. Much of this is intentional. Users are invited to slowly explore, learn how the system works, and come to their own conclusions. As such, the interface design and link names are quite unconventional and may confuse first-time users. This is reminiscent of the early days of the web, when interfaces were experimental and game-like. For impatient users, clicking on the rotating key at the top-left will direct them to the Super Index, where they can pick and choose what to explore in a more structured manner.

As for the content, the artwork, essays, poetry, and video poems are all impeccably produced. It is a joy to discover new things and ruminate on the themes. Even panning over the four maps can be a powerful aesthetic experience in itself. Certain segments are painted. Others are drawn in a sketchy minimalist style and others still are collage. The compositions are all imbued with dense meaning and references.

However, there are some challenges with the design of the atlas. Particularly, the website is not optimized for mobile devices. Attempting to view it in a mobile browser will trigger a message to urge the user to view it on a desktop or laptop instead. However, this doesn’t detract from the value of the work.

Ultimately, the Feral Atlas is a dense project. While the site can be difficult to comprehend and the interface isn’t optimized for all devices, there is no doubt that the work is a stunning achievement of collaboration and should serve as a model for future digital humanities projects in the same vein.

Museum Digital Initiatives During The Coronavirus Pandemic

April - 2022May - 2022 Karina Wratschko

Freyja T. Catton, MLIS, BFA
Wordeater Consulting
freyjacatton@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.17613/s6m7-9a65

Museum digital initiatives during the Coronavirus Pandemic is an Austrian-based research project by Dr. Chiara Zuanni on the impact of COVID-19 on museums and their digital strategies. The homepage presents a map of museum digital initiatives around the world. The digital initiatives are categorized by type: contemporary collecting projects, social media initiatives, streaming content, virtual tours, online exhibitions, games, educational content, other activities, and tweets tagged #ClosedButActive.

The categories are indicated on the map by color and icon. Projects are flagged by location in one category color.

A map of Europe with color-coded icons indicating projects in different locations. The legend is across the top of the map and the filter categories are overlaid on the right-hand side. — Screenshot of map with legend and filter categories.

Users click and drag to navigate the map, then click on one of the flags to read brief project descriptions. Each description includes titles, category, institution name, summary, and URL. The map supports filtering by category. Each country is shown using its own alphabets and names, further demonstrating the global impact of the project.

A map of eastern Canada/US border and Guelph Museum indicated with an orange flag and text box that reads: "Guelph Museum, Rapid response collection. The museum launched a contemporary collecting project: “We are interested in collecting contemporary objects and personal expressions, in the midst of city-wide closures, social distancing protocols, and our individual and collective experiences.” Text is followed by a URL link for Guelph Museums. — Screenshot of the map over eastern Canada/US border and Guelph Museum selected (orange flag).

Users must begin their search with a location they’re interested in and click and drag to get there. There is no search option, which makes quick searches difficult. The webpage is responsive to different browser sizes. This website relies heavily on a good internet connection, as connection lags make it hard to navigate.

The technology feels a little underwhelming at first, because all of the information shared isn’t searchable and is viewed on a single page. However, the information presented is clear, complex, and very useful. It’s fun to poke around at different projects around the world!

The website is freely available on the internet for anyone to use. Zuanni is dedicated to making this easily available and to expand and refine the dataset as the collection grows. Contribution forms are presented in several different languages. A lot of work went into making this website multilingual.

In the “About” page, users can learn about the project by reading the summary and related papers and reviews. The reviews correspond with areas of the map that are dense with contributions. Many of the digital initiatives and museums represented are in central and western Europe and in the US. There was a surprising lack of museums represented in Canada, as well as eastern Europe, such as Ukraine. The absence of Ukraine stood out because many cultural heritage organizations there are actively working to preserve their collections during wartime, for example Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online.

It is not clear what the vetting process is like for accepting submissions, or how initiatives are recruited other than by contribution. In the contribution form on the website, there is a summary statement at the top indicating the purpose of the project, but questions do not specify that the project needs to be specifically a museum initiative, or developed in response to the COVID-19 closures.

Google Forms. The first question reads: “What is the name of the institution you wish to add to the list?” Second question reads: “Select the type of activity you wish to add to the list:” with a drop-down box below. — Contribution form

Considering the range of budgets and staff resources, Museum digital initiatives during the Coronavirus Pandemic projects are useful examples for the broader cultural heritage community, not just museum professionals. Although it’s unclear whether this project will extend beyond the height of the pandemic, it is a valuable resource for uncovering the impact of COVID-19 on museum digital strategies.