viz.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration traces its roots back to the oldest scientific agency in the United States: the Survey of the Coast established in 1807. Today's agency has a much broader purview, providing forecasts for the National Weather Service, maintaining orbiting satellites to monitor the Earth's climate, managing the nation's fisheries, and conducting scientific research. The database containing the photographic documentation of these varied activities provides the subject of this week's review.

Image Credit: Joseph Shelderfer 

During November and December I'll be devoting some blog posts to reviews of image archives recently added to the viz. "Images" resource page. First up is the gallery from the New York City Department of Records released in April 2012. The archive "provides free and open research access to over 800,000 items digitized from the Municipal Archives’ collections, including photographs, maps, motion-pictures and audio recordings." It is from the research perspective that I approach this review. Alan Taylor, at The Atlantic's photography blog In Focus, included some highlights he found while browsing the archive (warning: images include evidence photography from homicide crime scenes). Browsing through the images is certainly a good way to spend some time (perhaps too much time), but the archive is also organized through a series of collections that can help the viewer sift through the nearly one million images from the Big Apple.

Image credit: My video "reading" of Donald Revell's "Election Year"

Last semester I began to experiment with various programs, particularly iMovie, as I think about how I'd make digital technology part of a course that focuses on poetry. In a brief post, I included a model iMovie file, and speculated as to how such an exercise might be used. Today, as we wrap up National Poetry Month, I'm posting a lesson plan that articulates the possibilities for this exercise more directly.  

(Image Credits:  Association of Religion Data Archives)

What do people mean when they say that the United States is a religious nation, or even a Christian nation?  The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) compiles data taken from census records and surveys to provide comprehensive information on expressions of faith throughout the nation.  Of particular interest to this blog is the impressive interactive map database that allows you to choose and compare data sets in order to gain specific information about rates of adherence, denominational affiliation, and demographics.  I have used these in my Literature and Religion class to help students begin to think about the relationship between faith and other socio-cultural forces, such as immigration patterns and socio-economic changes in a region.  

An American physician of the late nineteenth century, with his doctor's bag and horse and buggy. Colour lithograph by E.C. Pease, 1910.

Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London

Last spring, viz. rounded up a number of important visual archives and databases. Viz. readers interested in the history of medicine should consider adding Wellcome Images to that list. A major visual collection of the U.K.’s Wellcome Library, its offerings range “from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.”

Image Credit: Sarlandière, Jean-Baptiste. Anatomie méthodique, ou Organographie humaine en tableaux synoptiques, avec figures.

(Paris: Chez les libraires de médecine, et chez l'auteur, 1829).

Historical Anatomies on the Web 

This week I thought I play far afield from my usual subject areas by exploring the image database for the National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division.  This database--Historical Anatomies on the Web--showcases many high-quality digital images of the NLM’s collection of illustrated anatomical atlases dating from the 15^th to the 20^th century.  The quality of the images, the detailed historical introductions to each anatomical atlas, and the descriptions of the illustration techniques all contribute to the immense pedagogical potential of this collection.

The following is a list of notable image databases and archives.

Click the 'Review' link to access a viz. review of the database.

General Image Databases

American Memory, hosted by the Library of Congress

British Library Images Online

Calisphere, hosted by the University of California

New York Public Library Digital Archives

Tineye, a reverse search engine through which users can learn more about images they already have

UNESCO Photobank, hosted by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization

US Government Photos and Images

Databases by topic in alphabetical order:

(*) denotes requires subscription or login and (W) denotes has institutional Watermark on images.

Advertising

AdAccess, hosted by Duke

Emergence of Advertising in America, hosted by Duke [viz. review]

African-American History

(W) Calvin Littlejohn Archive, hosted by Center for American History, UT-Austin [viz. review]

John H. White Portrait of Black Chicago, hosted by the National Archives [viz. review]

Art and Photography

(*) ARTstor Digital Library, hosted by ARTstor, Inc. Link for UT login.

(*) CAMIO (Catalogue of Art Museum Images Online), hosted by OCLC. Link for UT login.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs

National Veterans Art Museum

Body and Medicine

Historical Anatomies on the Web, hosted by The National Library of Medicine [viz. review]

Dream Anatomies, hosted by The National Library of Medicine [viz. review]

(W) Wellcome Images, hosted by The Wellcome Library, London [viz. Review]

World Health Organization Photo Library [warning: contains images that may be disturbing to non-medical audiences]

Commons & Public Domain Image Databases

Flickr, Creative Commons

Creative Commons Search

Library of Congress Flickr Stream

Search Flickr US Government Works License

Historic Prints

Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection, hosted by Yale [viz. review]

Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North America, hosted by Lewis and Clark [viz. review]

Labor

Red Scare Archive, hosted by CUNY [viz. review]

Labor Rights Archive, hosted by LaborArts.org [viz. review]

Tamiment Labor Archives Highlights on Flickr

Literature

(*) DASe (Digital Archive Services), hosted by Utexas Liberal Arts ITS

Maps

American Geographical Society Library Digital Map Collection

David Rumsey Map Collection  [viz. review]

Municipal Archives

(W) London Metropolitan Archives COLLAGE Image Database

New York City Municipal Archives Images Gallery [viz. review]

Seattle Municipal Archives

Music

(W) Texas Poster Art, hosted by the Briscoe Center at UT-Austin

National Archives

Images Canada

National Archives (UK) Image Library

National Archives (US) Galleries

Nature

NASA images

European Space Agency Images

NOAA Photo Library [viz. review]

Photography

Life Photo Archive, hosted by Google

William Gedney, hosted by Duke 

(W) (*) Magnum Photos, hosted by Magnum [Viz. Review]

(W) (*) Associated Press, hosted by AP [Review]

Symbols & Iconography

The Noun Project

Technology/Electronic Media

Radical Software, hosted by Radical Software  [Viz. Review]

Texas

Portal to Texas History, hosted by the University of North Texas

Image Credit:  A Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections

I thought I’d step back from the contemporary pop culture discussions today to look into two archives with a more historical emphasis:  the Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection and A Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections.  Both of these collections offer extensive resources for instructors in eighteenth-century literature, politics, art, and culture.

(Image Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection)

Frances A. Henshaw, a student at the Middlebury Female Academy, created geographical diagrams like the one above to accompany her hand-drawn maps in her Book of Penmanship Executed at the Middlebury Female Academy April 29, 1828.  According to the David Rumsey Map Collection Database, Henshaw’s Book of Penmanship went far beyond penmanship, including not only maps of 19 U.S. States with accompanying original diagrams (like the above), but also astronomical maps, charts of Coperican and Ptolemaic celestial systems, as well as maps of other prominent cartographic features such as equator, meridian, polar circles, latitude and longitude. Henshaw’s geographical diagrams seem to serve to illustrate or amplify the geographical data conveyed through her maps: reading in a diamond pattern (from the left and right upper diagonals, inward, then from the right and left lower diagonals, outward), the diagram reads:

Ohio.  The number of old forts in Kentucky county are the admiration of the curious and a matter of Speculation.  Columbia is the seat of government… The Ohio river…… nearly half surrounds the state.  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx    

Image credit: screen shot of Emergence of Advertising in America database 

On March 26^th  Noel will be leading our workshop on Best Practices for Digital Images here at the DWRL and in preparation for that meeting many of us at viz. are compiling several blog postings on image databases.  This week Rachel posted about Radical Software—a database that provides access to work done in the ‘seventies with the creation of and theorizing about digital and video media.  I’d like to take us back even further to a database dedicated to making available early advertising images from the mid-nineteenth century through to the 1920s.  I found Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 to be extremely entertaining to browse and can easily imagine integrating it into my classroom practice.