viz. - archives

Is the relatively frequent disappearance of important data a natural feature of human societies?

Jay Voss — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:33:37 +0000

(Image credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve always been amazed that our ancestors lost copies of gospels we think existed, Ciceronian tracks we know were read, and Shakespeare plays we know to have been performed. How do such valuable things disappear? Who’s accountable for these losses? Who ever commissioned Vasari paint a fresco over da Vinci’s The Battle of Anghiari in the Palazzo Vecchio’s Salone dei Cinquecento? (No one today would dare destroy the Vasari – a masterwork in its own right – to see if the da Vinci lay underneath; though we’re 95% sure the da Vinci lies under it, I’d say.) In truth, the real history of these lost artifacts is much more complex, and it’s kind of hard to hold anyone accountable for the losses. Different cultures in different times appreciate different treasures from our past. There exists a whole bookshelf’s worth of scholarship about Shakespeare’s only moderate popularity in his own day, explaining perhaps how Love’s Labour’s Won or Cardenio could have fallen through the cracks. Nor should Vasari feel bad for taking a da Vinci battle painting from us. Leonardo was experimenting with a new painting technique after a bad experience with variations of the fresco medium in The Last Supper, and in The Battle of Anghiari we think he used a thick undercoat of something (possibly a wax) to help preserve the finished product. But the medium used in The Battle of Anghiari was even more prone to decomposition than that of The Last Supper, and thus the painting remained damaged and unfinished for over 100 years before Vasari picked up his brush. The drawing above is a 1603 copy by Peter Paul Rubens.

(Image credit: Foreign Policy blog)

I’ve been thinking about all this since last Friday, when news broke that libraries in Timbuktu had been destroyed in Mali’s ongoing chaos. As Lila Azam Zanganeh reports in the New Yorker’s blog, up to three of the city’s eight libraries were probably destroyed by rebels during their rampage. These archives contained centuries of learning. The most important of them was the Ahmed Baba Centre, which contained up to 100,000 different pieces of writing, many of them dating back to the thirteenth century. The writings cover such diverse topics as political science, history, botany, poetry, anatomy, women’s rights, and music. These are all topics that, as Zanganeh reports in the New Yorker blog, are typically deemed evil by Islamic fundamentalists. (Although, ironically, the city’s medieval universities were always Islamic).

(Image credit: Wikipedia)

Understanding how remote Timbuktu, situated on the southern extremity of the Sahara Desert, came to be the center of learning is important. Many valuable trade routes passed through the city from the fifteenth century onwards (see map above), and this commerce, coupled with the town’s mosque and university, produced a significant culture of intellectual pursuit. Scholars and scribes in Timbuktu wrote about a range of topics, and they assumed a fundamental value in recording these advancements for future generations. In the quick three to four hours that I have in my schedule this week to post a blog entry for your delectation, I couldn’t ascertain what the shifting borders of the medieval Sahara were. So it’s hard for me to say with any authority whether the city has always found itself in such a sparse environment (look it up on Google Maps), but it’s fair to assume that Timbuktu has at certain times enjoyed greater wealth and lushness than at present. Just the same as it once enjoyed a more vibrant intellectual culture. I suppose part of what the rebels must have been after in destroying these libraries was a visual articulation of their poise. They wanted outsiders to look over at Mali and see that they mean business. What this suggests to me, however, is the importance of learning to all peoples, and the extent to which intellectual hubs can come and go. Central Texas, where I live, is currently experiencing an extended drought. The price of drinking water is sure to skyrocket over the next 50 years. Who knows what effect these economics will have on our archive, the Harry Ransom Center, much less the city’s vibrant culture.

Archiving the Past, Archiving the Future

Laura Thain — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 21:25:38 +0000

Image Credit: Laura Thain

Archives are by definition past-oriented. The very act of “archiving” renders an object an artifact of a specific past, although its orientation within that past depends on the disciplinary practice of the archivist. 20^th century archival studies have made considerable movements toward standardization, and alongside this standardization of archival methodologies comes an expansion of that which we consider worthy of being archived. Thus, we no longer operate under the assumption that 20^th century archives will be composed exclusively of objects from a distant, exclusively white Western patriarchal past—we compose queer archives, postcolonial archives, feminist archives, and, perhaps, in the case of Bel Geddes, even archives of the future. Join me as I explore the idea of a future archive and its relationship to the archival ethos of the Harry Ransom Center, in part by exploring exhibition visitor’s own “visions” of the future.

The push for expansion of Western archives in the 20^th century operates at least in part on a simple premise: that those who write the past control the present. As the old saying goes, “history is written by the victors.” This implies a causal relationship in which the privilege of history writing is the purview of the dominant cultural force, but we must realize that power transfers both ways here—the very act of writing history can transform an underrepresented body into a powerful voice in the public sphere. So if the composition of the archive determines the perspective of the present, where can we place the future in such a schema? What place do imaginations of the future have in this archive? And how much can these imaginations serve as self-fulfilling prophecies, transforming futuristic visions into powerful agents of change?

Image Credit: Laura Thain. Click for larger image.

The court of public opinion can help us here to determine how the idea of “the future” figures into public imagination. The Center ends the Bel Geddes exhibition with a display of Bel Geddes’ 1930 predictions of 1940. On either side of the display, there is space for viewers to make their own predictions about “the near future.”

The submissions generally break down into three categories: optimistic/utopic, pessimistic/apocalyptic, and neutral/technological. The optimistic responses reveal what viewers wish for in the future, often against the historical trajectories of the present: “nobama,” “astros win world series,” “less die,” “ Hispanic gay president,” “blending of races,” “no war or hunger,” “North/South Korean peace,” or “more pie.” As one submitted emphasizes, “HOPE! The future is now!” These optimistic views of the future make claims about what viewers desire in the present.

Image Credit: Laura Thain

In the pessimistic/apocalyptic responses, viewers reveal problems the claim exist in the present which can only become more dramatic in the future: “robots will complete their domination,” “civil war,” “our plan[e]t will be really polluted,” “more wildlife species go extinct,” “war in the Middle East,” “zombie apocalypse,” and “less pie.” Although some of the responses take their apocalyptic claims less seriously than others, all use the “future archive” to levy complaints against past and present.

Image Credit: Laura Thain

Finally, there are those that, like Bel Geddes, make technological predictions that contain no value judgments. Technology is synonymous with progress in these sorts of claims, but all base their notions of future developments on the present “frontier:” “flying cars,” “materials and engineering will be based on [natural phenomena],” “everything [will be a] touch screen,” “personalized medicine using genetics,” “cheaper printers so civilians can make their own products,” “self-repairing materials,” or “deep space exploration.” These comments define what, among the current cutting edge technologies, constitutes “the frontier” and make inferences based on these assumptions, a style of futuristic archive that resembles Bel Geddean futurism more strongly than the optimistic or pessimistic visions of the future.

Image Credit: Laura Thain

I’d like to suggest that this neutral ethos is strongly related to the ethos of the Ransom Center’s archival practices in general and the role of critical distance in the process of archival acquisitions in particular. Although the Center has invested considerable resources in acquiring sources of importace to traditional notions of the Western Canon, its pre-20^th century sources often do not compare to those of older, more heavily endowed archives. Instead, what distinguishes the Center’s archive is its eagerness to extend archival resources to 20^th century materials and its attempt, most notably under Tom Staley, to acquire on the literary “frontier.” By making smart bets, or, we might say, futuristic prophesies about the future value of present literature, the Harry Ransom Center’s archival ethos shares much of the futuristic vision that its Bel Geddes exhibition celebrates.

Image Credit: Laura Thain. Click for larger image.

One final note on “archives of the future”: the rapid technological innovation the exhibition’s audiences foresee (and not without good reason) also implies that as the rate of such innovation increases, so too does the process of archaicizing older technology. But while this translates to uselessness of futility in the world of technology, archaic or the past-oriented attributes in the literary world are a precondition of canonical status. As this canonical process becomes increasingly compressed, I’d venture to predict (perhaps optimistically?) that the canon of the future will expand even further.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Image Database Review: New York City Department of Records Online Image Gallery

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:49:22 +0000

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: New York City Department of Records

Users access the archive through the LUNA interface, and can choose to either browse by collection or search by keyword. I'll discuss the search function after exploring the curated categories. LUNA provides embedding and linking function to help share the images users find in the archive. By signing up for an account, users can also use LUNA to create sideshow presentations. After clicking on the "Enter the Online Gallery" link, the user is presented with the LUNA interface. A sidebar on the left links to the collections, a center frame provides selected "featured" images, and a menu bar at the top of the interface links to the collections, sharing and presentation functions.

Image Credit: Jack Rosenzwieg

The collections provide a helpful point of entry into the vast database, though the collections themselves are many in number. The collections are drawn from a variety of sources: administrative departments within the city government (the Board of Education, Department of Parks and Recreation, Sanitation and Street Cleaning, etc.), political offices (various NYC mayors and Borough presidents), the District Attorney's office and Police Department. There is a collection for images from maps and atlases of the city. The archive also houses materials from the NYC Unit of the federal WPA Writers' Project.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collection names do give a general idea of their contents, but the collections hold many images that are not immediately connected to the originating office or program. For example, the political office collections unsurprisingly hold thousands of images of mayors speaking to the people of New York, glad-handing constituents and otherwise engaged in the activities of their office. But, they also include images related to larger political, cultural and historical context of the mayors' eras. For example, the LaGuardia collection includes some anti-German WWII propaganda, such as John Hawkins' photo of Dan Daniels sculpture of Hitler crushing screaming victims in his hand.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Other surprises can be found in the Sanitation and Street cleaning collection, which, as you might expect, includes images related to sewers and garbage collection. However, its holdings include many older images, "contain[ing] ... 30,000 acetate (4x5), & some 8x10 glass & acetate negatives and 280 glass (5x7), and 360 lantern slides from its precursor agency the Department of Street Cleaning." Unfortunately most of these images are not available through the online interface, but those that are give a glimpse into the history of public works in New York City, such as this lantern slide of men working on a garbage barge circa the turn of the twentieth century.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collections also include a massive project undertaken in the 1980s by the Department of Finance. As described in the archive, the Department of Finance photographed every building and lot in the five NYC Boroughs for tax assessment purposes, updating photos previously taken in 1939 and 1940. These collections could help those interested in architecture, the development of the city over time, or just feeling nostalgic for 1980s movies filmed in New York.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

There are a couple of caveats when it comes to the research utility of the archive. First, the amount of metadata provided varies from image to image. The varying quality and quantity of metadata may be due in part to the diverse sources and range of historical eras from which the images come. It makes sense that records from, say, the New York Police Department in 1913 might be limited compared to those available from more recent sources. However, more recent sources do not always provide copious data with their images. The image of Mayor Giuliani from 13 December 1996 above, for instance, contains no information about the people surrounding the mayor or the subject of the event at which he speaks. Images with limited metadata can impede the usefulness of the search function.

Image Credit: Screenshot of LUNA zoom function

The second caveat is about the limited quality of many of the images. The Department of Records offers users the opportunity to purchase high quality prints or high quality digital images for publication purposes. Depending on the research purposes of a given user, lack of higher quality images may pose more or less of a limitation. The LUNA interface allows the user to zoom in on images, but as seen in the image above, when the image quality is low, the zoom is of limited use. Using the Giuliani example again, it is difficult to make out the faces of those standing behind the mayor.

These limits, however, should be balanced against the convenience of online access and the sheer number of artifacts available to the user.

The Composition of Popular Romance: Gone with the Wind's Storyboards

Rachel Schneider — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:23:57 +0000

Image Credit: Rachel Schneider

After a crash of cymbals, the bright brass instruments build to a climax until the violins enter: so begins “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Pulitzer-prize winning novel was a legitimate phenomenon before the movie, but the 1939 film is an artistic achievement on its own merits. Gone with the Wind was one of the first movies chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry in part because of its rich history. Gone with the Wind not only holds the record for the highest box office ever (when adjusted for inflation), but also held the rest for most Academy Awards (10) until 1960. Numerous books and documentaries recount the tangled history of the film’s production, which was plagued with cast battles, multiple directors, expensive delays, screenplay revisions, and a battle with the Hays Office to preserve an infamous final line. Much of the material for this work comes from the Harry Ransom Center’s extensive David O. Selznick Collection, which contains not only the producer’s numerous papers but also various production materials from his films.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The Harry Ransom Center not only features this collection in past and future exhibitions, but also displays its contents on its windows, which show several of the film’s storyboards on the Center’s north and northeast walls. What the storyboards can tell us both about film history and Gone with the Wind itself is something I want to briefly examine here.

As discussed by Alan David Vertrees in his book Selznick’s Vision: Gone with the Wind and Hollywood Filmmaking, David Selznick and Gone with the Wind are central to the history of cinematic production design. Selznick created the title “production designer” for William Cameron Menzies, the man who drew Gone with the Wind’s storyboards—drawings which suggested the flow and look of each scene. Gone with the Wind was one of the first live action pictures to be entirely storyboarded. Thus, while production designers were originally responsible for scenic design only, Menzies influenced Gone with the Wind’s entire look, including color, lighting, composition, and camera movement. His achievement garnered him a special Academy Award for “outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood in the production of Gone with the Wind.” The film’s original trailer gives some sense of what Menzies accomplished:

The Harry Ransom Center’s windows show storyboards depicting the film’s fire sequence, which a Gallup poll of North American audience members deemed its most memorable episode. However, the Ransom Center’s archives also include storyboards of other sequences, and I took this opportunity to delve into the Selznick Collection’s storyboards to learn more about what storyboarding in Hollywood’s golden age entailed, and what effects these visuals might have.

Searching through several boxes of Gone with the Wind storyboards held within the Selznick Collection, I was interested to note their variety. Some of the boards (like the ones for the fire scene) were relatively compact squares; others, like the ones I found portraying the Twelve Oaks barbecue that takes place early in the movie, are more substantial: made entirely of wood, at least a foot across in length, and reasonably heavy. My photograph here tries to capture what these storyboards actually look like.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Despite their age, their colors are quite striking, as the storyboard depicting the O’Hara family’s arrival at Twelve Oaks shows.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Menzies incorporates various color palettes into the film to visually highlight the differences among the film’s early antebellum scenes, the later stark Civil War sequence, and the bleak Reconstruction period. However, Menzies often doubles the heroine’s fiery personality with reds: Scarlett’s flight from Atlanta is illuminates by the flaming buildings around her; a burning sky backlights her defiant declaration that she’ll “never be hungry again”; the burgundy ball gown she wears to Ashley’s birthday party after being caught embracing him marks her as a scarlet woman.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The color palette also is distinguished from particularly difficult scenes where Scarlett shoots a Union officer, or faces assault from men in the Shantytown near her mills. The storyboards do not illustrate the scenes in detail, but provide a sketch for what it should look like. Pencil lines are still visible among the color.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

These storyboards are uniquely valuable not only for their place in film history, but also for thinking more about how artists like Menzies and Selznick visually composed Gone with the Wind’s epic romance. The “sketchness” of the storyboards conveys some of the sense of fragility inherent in the film’s narrative. By movie’s end, Scarlett is forced to rethink all her ambitions and desires, to recognize both the fragility of her world and her own mistaken understandings of Rhett and Ashley. Her narrative resembles the mental acts of revision that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy undergo in Pride and Prejudice, but with a more complicated finale: instead of uniting, she and Rhett part. Gone with the Wind perverts conventional romance by denying love at the close.

Yet, the film’s last shots complicate the trailer’s claim that “the screen has never known a love story to compare with this, when Rhett Butler meets Scarlett O’Hara.” Instead of despairing when she loses Melanie and Rhett, the people who loved and supported her, Scarlett’s face and the music express hope as she and the viewer both realize her truest love: Tara, her family’s home. It is Tara that provides her the strength to assert that “tomorrow is another day,” and the final shot of Scarlett standing outside her family home, posed against a sky filled with red clouds takes the viewer back to her refusal to give up in the face of poverty, hunger, and despair. Menzies’s visual logic makes Gone with the Wind more than a love story between a man and a woman; it is instead a love letter to America, written to Americans shaken by the Great Depression. Gone with the Wind celebrates both a defiant land and the hopes of the people who populated it. In representing the film through Scarlett’s escape from a burning Atlanta on their windows, the Harry Ransom Center embraces Gone with the Wind as an American narrative worthy of further study.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal: Musings on Contradictions with the Harry Ransom Center’s Etched Window Façade

Lisa Gulesserian — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:29:43 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Two images related to one of the most respected French poets of the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire, grace the Harry Ransom Center’s etched glass façade. Yes, the images of a disturbingly beautiful flower bud and a similarly ominous bouquet on the cover for Baudelaire’s 1857’s collection of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal, are on the Ransom Center’s south and north windows because the Center has holdings of Baudelaire’s work in their French Literature collection. But, maybe the Ransom Center’s choice to use Baudelaire twice when there are many other French authors they could have chosen to represent leads us to another reason why Baudelaire is so prominently represented in the Center’s public face. Baudelaire has always been a dialectical figure of contradiction—twentieth-century literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin found in Baudelaire the linchpin around which he could situate the conundrum of urbanity in the nineteenth century. In Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project (compiled between 1927-1940), Benjamin muses that the “uninterrupted resonance which Les Fleurs du mal has found up through the present day is linked to a certain aspect of the urban scene, one that came to light only with the city’s entry into poetry. It is the aspect least of all expected. What makes itself felt through the evocation of Paris in Baudelaire’s verse is the infirmity and decrepitude of a great city.” The contradictions of the metropolis—the high and the low, the beautiful and the grotesque—are everywhere in Les Fleurs du mal. Like Benjamin, the Ransom Center uses Baudelaire in their window façade as one figure through which we can view the many contradictions of visual representation and archival work.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal deals in visual contradictions. The title of Baudelaire’s poetry collection, often translated as “The Flowers of Evil,” immediately makes its main contradiction clear. Flowers are often associated with love, youth, spring, and vitality. Stereotypically, evil is tied to images that are often the opposite of themes associated with flowers. So, a beautiful flower that is simultaneously evil makes for a slight contradiction under typical visual tropes. Baudelaire’s evil flower (illustrated by Odilon Redon) has thistles that look like needles, a single razor-sharp leaf, and large black splotches. Yet, it’s still beautiful.

Image Credit: Library of Congress

The ominous flower in the Ransom Center’s façade brings a visual contradiction to the fore with its placement next to Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph from 1936, Migrant Mother, of a beautifully anxious woman in the Depression. Both images are beautiful, but there is something sinister lurking underneath, whether it’s the evil of the flowers or the worry of the migrant mother. And there are many images like Lange’s or Redon’s that are beautiful but depict something frightening, disgusting, or depressing.

Image Credit: Brown University Library Exhibits

Besides showing that visual images can play with contradictions, Baudelaire can also bring up another contradiction—that of the past in the present. In the portrait above by Georges Rochegrosse, Baudelaire is haunted by the past in the present. To Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire represents this contradiction in his very being. Benjamin is surprised by how the “‘Old-fashioned’ and ‘immemorial’ are still united in Baudelaire. The <things> that have gone out of fashion have become inexhaustible containers of memories.” The past is alive in Baudelaire’s life, and Benjamin explains that “It is very important that the modern, with Baudelaire, appear not only as the signature of an epoch but as an energy by which this epoch immediately transforms and appropriates antiquity.” It is here that Baudelaire represents a quality highly valued by Benjamin—the quality to view the world, with its objects and its people, through a different lens. Like the figure of the collector in The Arcades Project who sees treasures in the relics of the past, Baudelaire sees value in rethinking and reviewing the past in the present. Of course, as a place that houses many archives, the Ransom Center might be equally invested in bringing the past into the present. In using Baudelaire on their façade, the Center could be asking us to think about the contradictions of visual representation and archival work. I think that Walter Benjamin would have been proud.

Images

noelradley — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:47:58 +0000

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

Labor Archives

fc — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:42:02 +0000

Image Credit: Red Scare archive

The image above-- an anti-labor cartoon claiming that the sloth of American workers (who only want to work a measly 8 hours a day and spend the rest of the day lounging with their pipes) was endangering American competitiveness with Weimar Germany (and we know how well things worked out for them)-- could serve as "exhibit A" in the argument that entrenched interests never view ANY concession as reasonable. The 8-hour work day has by now become such a sacred cow in American society that it seems almost natural, but the 8-hour day did not spring up miraculously on the 8th day of creation. Along with many other rights and protections that we currently take for granted, it was the result of a decades-long struggle of workers against the egregious abuses of industrial captial in the heady days of its American youth. "Exhibit A" comes from Red Scare, an image database hosted by the City University of New York that documents the social upheaval of 1918-1921. Digital archives like Red Scare and Labor Arts preserve and present a history of America's labor movement through photographs, cartoons, fliers, songbooks and other visual artifacts.

When Noel asked us to prepare for the upcoming Best Practices workshop by blogging on digital archives, I immediately volunteered to cover archives focusing on labor. While this may seem like http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/node/522/edita departure from my typical posts on food and food politics, the history of our American food system from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle to the ongoing federal anti-trust investigation of Monsanto is inextricably linked with the history of labor. Contemporary concerns about food safety and quality cannot afford to ignore the labor conditions that underly the production of so-called "cheap" food. We cannot respect the food we buy, prepare and consume if we do not respect the men and women whose labor brings it out of the common earth.

This connection between labor and food is too often overlooked in the general divide between rural and urban interests (the country and the city). This cartoon from 1919 uses cliched images of bucolic country vitality and sickly urban scheming to enhance a nationalist argument that American farmers have nothing to gain from the "foreign" snake-oil of organized labor. These are, of course, the same share-croppers and dry-land farmers who would in the next decade be forced from their land by drought and abject poverty (many of whom became "Okies" who were later exploited in California labor camps).

Image Credit: Red Scare

Both Red Scare (hosted by CUNY's Newman Library) and Labor Arts (hosted by NYU's Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives) have explicitly pedagogical missions and are readily adaptable for use in the rhetoric classroom. Neither site offers images of sufficient size and quality to be useful in original research, but the images are well within the range of acceptible quality for an undergraduate class (Red Scare includes this technical note: "As they were all meant to serve as "reference" copies accessible via the Web, it was thought this quality of scan would be sufficient." Labor Arts includes some images of a substantially higher quality, but the overall size and quality of images is uneven).

Red Scare doesn't offer a search function, but the images are organized in heavily cross-referenced chronological and subject indexes; it also includes a brief guide to finding images in the archive. I had no problems finding images related to particular themes and subjects, and I stumbled on a lot of interesting material in the process. For instance, I clicked the "related images" link for one cartoon using Uncle Sam and was redirected to a page with all the archives Uncle Sam cartoons, including this gem from 1920.

Image Credit: Red Scare

Labor Arts organizes its images within "Collections" and "Exhibits." The "Collections" page lets users browse images organized by medium (buttons, photographs, pamplets, etc), theme ("civil rights," "strikes," "workers at work," etc.) or time period. The "Exhibits" present the same images collected in museum-like exhibitions about, for example, the Wobblies, Social Documentary Photography or Labor songbooks. Labor Arts also offers a fairly flexible search function; you can search for something as broad as a keyword or as narrow as an item number, and you can refine searches by organizaiton, occupation, date, ethnicity and several other criteria. A search for "farm" turned up twenty entries that included UFW posters, a "5 cents for fairness" button supporting strawberry pickers, and this picture of Woody Guthrie visiting a farm camp in 1941.

Image Credit: Labor Arts

In both its "Collections" and its "Exhibits," Labor Arts provides a substantial amount of relevant context for each image. For instance, this 1935 photograph of striking office workers is accompanied by text which points out that "had only recently won legal protection for their right to organize, with the passage of Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933. The Act's famous Section 7(a) recognized for the first time the right of workers to organize into unions of their own choosing to represent their interests."

Image Credit: Labor Arts

This kind of context (along with the broad scope of the collection and its ease of use) make Labor Arts a potentially useful pedagogical tool for classroom use or undergraduate research. The fact that the archive is supported financially by several labor unions could raise questions of objectivity, but I don't see any problems that couldn't be addressed with a brief class discussion on intellectually honest use of clearly biased material (a topic that most rhetoric instructors will probably want to discuss with their students anyways).

Either archive is worth exploring and provides links to other similar resources. I am personally looking forward to digging deeper in the Labor Arts archive, but, for now, I'm off to lunch.

Image Credit: Labor Arts

Archives and Associated Press

Andi — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:43:38 +0000

Image credit: Screen shot of APimages.com

A recent development in Shepard Fairey's ongoing legal battle with the Associated Press sent me thinking through some of the issues surrounding large private, not-for-profit, and commercial archives of stock photography and photojournalism. Last year, the AP claimed that Fairey violated copyright laws when he based his "Hope" poster for the Obama campaign on one of their photographs. Fairey countered that he was protected under fair use, but his situation suffered a setback last week when he admitted to knowingly submitting as evidence images that were different than those under consideration in the trial. While this case raises several interesting questions about the doctrine of fair use and visual allusion, I am also curious about the extent of influence the Associated Press has on our daily interactions with visual images. How does this massive news agency--with over 10 million images in its library--shape our access to and understanding of contemporary photojournalism?

Image credit: Shepard Fairey, Manny Garcia,

The Associated Press, and Myartspace.com

The Associated Press is a news cooperative comprised of several radio, television, and print sources that both contribute to and make use of material generated by staff journalists and affiliated journalists. The agency was originally founded during the Mexican American war by several New York newspapers but has since expanded in scope and size. According to their website, the Associated Press has 243 bureaus in 97 countries, distributes material to 1,700 newspapers, and has won 49 Pulitzer Prizes including 30 for photography. The agency generates over 1,000 images a day and the library houses negatives dating back over 100 years. Clearly this institution has had a long history of defining and developing our notion of photojournalism.

I had quite a bit of fun simply playing around with their search engine, typing in various combinations of terms--for instance, "war" and "women"--to gain a sense of how the AP organizes and indexes its images. The AP images archive allows "image buyers" to purchase prints for personal use or the rights to photographs for circulation. Images are organized into categories we might expect--"domestic news" and "sports"--and others that I found more surprising--"polar bears" and "faces of Obama." Without spending hours and hours culling through these collections (a prospect, I have to admit, that seems daunting and tempting), I can still begin to sense the sheer enormity of this archive and the extent to which I am at the mercy of the archivists, meaning-makers in the surfeit of visual information. Although in "The Body and the Archive" Alan Sekula wrote about the time period between 1880 and 1910, spending just a few minutes searching through the AP's digital collections today makes clear his argument that the creating of archives makes a claim on a particular vision of history with some images privileged and others others omitted or relegated to less visible spaces.