Tag: european art

June 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
BASIRA: Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art
Digital Florentine Codex
Perspectives on Data

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

Digitized Historical German Weeklies

Virginia Kerr

Reviewed by:
Grant G. Mandarino
Independent archivist/art historian
gmandarino@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.17613/yd2e-5y30

According to those responsible for this collection, the goal of this digitization project was to “make the most important political satire magazines of the last century available in full.” With backing from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), they did so in 2014, resulting in the site under review. It offers a full run of the German satire magazine Simplicissimus from its founding in 1896 to its closure in 1944, as well as digital runs of two other important publications: Jugend (1896-1940) and Der Wahre Jacob (1884-1933). In lieu of accessing physical copies, rare outside of Germany, there is no better means of interacting with these primary sources that reflect critical eras in Germany’s eventful twentieth-century history.As a scholarly resource, the site is exceptional; as a model for digitizing serial publications, it is exemplary.

Academic libraries and archival repositories have joined many museums in making high resolution digital surrogates of their unique collections available for research. Responsibility for this site belongs to the Klassik Stiftung Weimar (KSW), connected to the Herzogin Anna Amelia Bibliothek in Weimar, in collaboration with the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach and faculty at the Rheinisch-Westfälischen Technischen Hochschule Aachen, who oversaw the digitization of Simplicissimus. The Jugend and Der Wahre Jacob collections, on the other hand, come from the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg (UBH), who concurrently held a grant from the DFG to digitize their own holdings of German and foreign satire magazines, and at some point became a further contributor to the project. One can find a broader array of publications via a UBH site, but the interface is clunkier and requires a considerable amount of scrolling and clicking to get to individual issues.

A peculiarity of the KSW site is that there is no central homepage for the three digitized periodical titles; instead each has a separate start page (Startseite) accessed from tabs at the top of the site. Each start page applies the same interface design and accesses shared features. The pages provide an intuitive browsing structure, as well as contextual essays and linked databases that aid navigation, whether one is browsing for pleasure or researching a specific topic. Locating and examining individual issues of Simplicissimus, Jugend, and Der Wahre Jakob on the KSW’s site is a breeze. 

Screen shot of a list of issue dates with tabs at the top for other site features, including indexes and contextual material.
List of issues for the digitized satire magazine Jugend

From the “Issues” (Blättern) page of each start page one is given a chronological list by volume. From there it is just a matter of choosing an issue number, listed alongside its publication date, with a thumbnail image of the front cover. Pages are scanned in color, ideal for documenting these examples of early commercial color printing; the image resolution online is adequate for reading and study, and a “lupe” is provided to magnify page details. Full issues can be viewed online or freely downloaded as PDFs, albeit in lower image resolution. The site does not offer OCR for the digitized titles.

Supplemental pages provide further tools for access as well as context. Of special note are the linked databases. One (Personenliste) indexes every contributor (writers, illustrators, and caricaturists) in the three magazines and links to issues their work appears in; the other (Schlagwörter) lists  thematic terms, places, or historical people referenced in the magazines, with identifying  biographical/historical information culled from Wikipedia and the catalog of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. A search field on the homepage accesses both lists, but search results are inconsistent and do not compile data from all three publications. Contextual pages outline the history of the publications (Zeitschrift), contain a thorough bibliography (Literatur), and introduce the project (Gesamtprojekt) and its various contributors (Grates; Kontakt). 

Screen shot of the home page for Simplicissimus, with links to other site features, including indexes and contextual material.
Home page for the digitized satire magazine Simplicissimus 

According to the team, the site was mainly constructed with open-source components (e.g., MySQL, PHP, Typo3). If upgrades could be implemented, the ability to compare two issues at a time or generate virtual collections would greatly improve usability. As currently configured, the site remains nevertheless a boon for scholars of German print culture and political thought.