viz. - image databases

Image Database Review: NOAA Photo Library

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 02:05:11 +0000

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: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

The web interface for the NOAA Photo Library is presented to the user through a basic html webpage. The entry screen displays an Image of the Day. The NOAA Photo Library organizes some its holdings with a number of Collections. The Collections are linked in a frame to the left of the screen. The site also provides a simple search box that the user accesses through a link on a line of menu tabs that run below the "NOAA Photo Library" banner. The search function permits the user to input one or more terms, but it provides no advanced keyword searching, limiting or sorting functions. The search function is provided through Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce; Photo by Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Staff

The NOAA Photo Library contains many images related to oceanic and atmospheric research. Some of the Collections include "America's Coastlines," "Weather Service," "Fisheries," and "Coral Kingdom." There are also some interesting surprises among its holdings, including the "Treasures of the Library" collection which includes images from texts dating back to the 15th century relating to the study of the oceans and climate and a collection of historic prints on the "Histories and Methods of Fisheries" documenting American fisheries in the late 19th century.

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

While the search function is limited, many of the photos have extensive "category" tags, and those tags can be used in the search to locate related images. Many of the Collections include sub-categories organized in albums, providing another means to navigate the extensive number of images that reside on the database.

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

One valuable aspect of the NOAA collection and any collection of imagery authored by a federal agency is the lack of copyright attached to the works. According to section 105 of the Copyright Act, "Copyright protection...is not available for any work of the United States Government." Agencies often attach some limitations to the images they release. For example, NOAA suggests that their images should primarily be used for education purposes and require that their images be credited "to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce. Where a photographer is noted, please credit the photographer and his/her affiliated organization as well." Other agencies, such as NASA expressly prohibit using images in a way that suggests NASA commercially endorses a product or service. Outside of such requirements, however, images may be used freely.

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

Another strength of the Library is its inclusion of higher resolution images for many of the photos. In some cases, the original photos themselves were not high resolution images, so the higher resolution images provided on the website are of limited use, but for other images, such as photos of the historic book plates and more recent nature photography, the image quality is quite high.

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.

Lesson Plan - Teaching Poetry with Image Databases

ebfrye — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:00:19 +0000

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.

Goals:

Interpretation of content, historical analysis, visual literacy, public performance, class editions, citation, fair use

Overview of Assignment:

Each week one or two students create a digital “reading” of a poem using images. Students use image databases, such as the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs collection, to pair relevant images with a poem of their choosing. They then record themselves reading the poem and arrange the images in an order of their choosing using a program such as iMovie. On their assigned day, students present their “readings” to the class, and the class is asked to respond. Students are also required to submit a process essay with their pieces that explains the rationale for their poem and image selection and how they are using images to “interpret” the piece. The essay should include a bibliography. The videos will be posted to a class blog or a class YouTube account. The exercise can be used to supplement or reinvigorate the recitation/ public performance exercises that are traditionally part of poetry pedagogy. Posting the videos in a common digital space create a class archive or collection of work, which could lead to further discussions about selection criteria and canonization.

The assignment may be repeated more than once during the semester to suit various ends:

-contextualize the poem historically using images appropriate to the poem’s time period

-interpret the poem’s content (may involve historically relevant but unaffiliated images)

-supplement their own pieces (in a workshop if the instructor assigns any creative writing assignments) with digitally available images or images they produce themselves

The assignment could also be done with an excerpt from a prose piece instead of a poem.

Assignment Length:

Semester-long project with each student contributing 2 videos and 2 process essays (4-5 pages and bibliography)

Materials:

iMovie, YouTube, image databases (Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs collection, New York Public Library Digital Archives, Library of Congress’s American Memory, etc.), class blog (optional)

Preparation Guidance:

Students should be introduced to and spend some time browsing image databases during class. They should also receive instruction for how to use iMovie and have some time to practice. It will also be helpful for them to have a model video, and you will need to set up a class YouTube account as a way to post their videos online. You may then choose to link those videos to a class blog. The videos should work in tandem with class discussions. These may emphasize the interaction of written and visual texts, historicist reading methods, the role of performance, and the impact of digital technology on literary production and presentation.

Mapping Religious Adherence: Association of Religion Data Archives

ladysquires — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 01:45:12 +0000

(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.

The map above shows proportional rates of religous adherence for all denominations nationwide. The darker a state is, the more religious it is. It is perhaps no suprirse that the Midwest and parts of the Deep South show the highest rates of adherence, but it is perhaps a bit counterintuitive that parts of the Northeast--New York and Massachusetts in particular--seem to be roughly on par with Mormon-dominated Utah and Oklahoma and is actually more religious than any of the states that constitute the Deep South. As you compare this map to maps that show adherence to specific denominations, a story begins to emerge.

As you can see here, Evangelical Christian affliation tends to be concentrated in the area we think of as the "Bible Belt," not exactly a surprise.

Perhaps equally unsurprising is the fact that Catholicism tends to be concentrated in the Southwest and Northeast, areas which are known for thier concentrations of Irish, Italian, and Hispanic families. This suggests that is, indeed, the high rate of Catholic affiliation that is driving the suprisingly high proportion of religious adherence in the "Godless North." In fact, proportionally, there are more Catholics per 1000 people in the Northeast than there are Evangelicals per 1000 in the South. What this data cannot tell us, however, is what adherence actually looks like. People may express a cultural or familial affiliation with the Catholic Church, for example, even if they haven't attended mass in 15 years. Religious adherence is, after all, often as much about cultural identification as it is about faith.

The database allows literally thousands of possible comparisons and allows you to examine data down to the state and county level. One can look at rates of religious adherence and compare them to demongraphic data on immigration, gender, voting trends, crime rates, proportion of men to women, urban vs. rural population concentrations, rates of new housing development, percentage of kids in private vs. public school, occupations, education levels, and how long it takes people to get to work in the morning. For example, below I took a look specifically at Texas and compared overall rates of religious adherence to the age of the population.

This is a comparison I don't quite know how to interpret. It shows rates of religious adherence becoming higher where the population is younger, when common wisdom suggests that younger generations tend to be less religious than their parents. Perhaps it is significant that the younger counties tend to also be border counties where the proportion of people who immigrated here in the last twenty years tends to be much higher. Age might simply be a correlation or it might indicate higher levels of cultural cohesiveness, where children identify with the values of their parents much more strongly.

This one, however, isn't really a surprise. The Evangelical Lutheran Church tends to be associated with higher concentrations of descendents of German and Scandinavian immigrants, and as you can see, it tends to be particularly concentrated (though the numbers are obviously statistically small) in that area between Austin and San Antonio usually associated with German heritage.

I could go on and on. If you do anything with religion, this is a great site for students to explore and play with. It is extremely user-friendly and has the potential to challenge what we think we know about religion in the United States. It also presents an excellent opportunity to talk about how we interpret data, correlation vs. causation, and statistical significance.

Database Review: Wellcome Images

emcg — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 01:16:44 +0000

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.”

A French dentist showing a specimen of his artificial teeth and false palates. Coloured engraving by Thomas Rowlandson, 1811.

Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London

There’s above all a spirit of freewheeling eclecticism that makes the database so enjoyable to browse. Representations of doctors range from the American dandy in the advert above, to a Japanese watercolor depicting a properly demure doctor-patient relationship, to dramatic canvases set in medical theaters. Images of ephemera from the collection include a medicine chest from the 1933 Mount Everest expedition and Charles Darwin’s whalebone walking stick with a goth-looking skull pommel. Artistic and medical images happily coexist: a digital artwork of a golden DNA double-helix appears next to a scanning electron micrograph of sickled and normal red blood cells.

In sum, Wellcome Images offers an experience of discovery and play akin to rooting around in a physical archive. The downside, as in a physical archive, is that one might struggle to contextualize these findings—the Wellcome's categories (e.g., “Nature,” "Life") are too broad to help us organize the images meaningfully.

Francis Crick Papers

Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London

In preparation for a brief unit on Literature and Medicine later this semester, I also decided to test out the database's search function, which allows users to refine results by date and technique. The search term "hysteria" resulted in 28 hits, turning up mainly photographs of female patients from the 1890s. This image search would make for a possible in-class exercise when we discuss Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow-Wallpaper." More broadly, the search results would work to initiate a conversation about the early use of photography as diagnostic tool, founded on a belief in its unassailable status as scientific evidence.

Three photographs in a series showing a hysterical woman screaming. Albert Londe, c. 1890.

Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London

The Wellcome Library allows watermarked-versions of their images to be “freely available for download for personal, academic teaching or study use, under one of two Creative Commons licences.” Visit the site for additional information about their terms of use.

Historical Anatomies: Visualizing the Body

Andi — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 20:38:03 +0000

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.

Accompanying this collection of images is an online exhibition called Dream Anatomy centered on the history of anatomy as a field. This interactive online component of the database explores the many ways that anatomy has evolved and considers how the history of depicting the human body has always moved toward a “visual vocabulary of realism” (Dream Anatomy).

Image credit: Gersdorff, Hans von. Feldtbůch der Wundartzney : newlich getruckt und gebessert.

(Strassburg: Hans Schotten zům Thyergarten, [1528]).

Historical Anatomies on the Web

Both the images in the database and many in the online exhibition are in the public domain and so may be freely distributed and copied when given proper acknowledgement (click here for more on use). While the collection is not easily searchable, it is incredibly fun to browse. Each page is full of detailed thumbnails so scanning the many images in each atlas is a quick way to familiarize yourself with what types of illustrations are in the collection. It seems likely that these images would be helpful for viz. readers working with or teaching the rhetoric of the body, the history of medicine, or the rhetoric of science.

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

Eighteenth-Century Engravings and Magnificent Mezzotints

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:32:38 +0000

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.

The Lewis Walpole Library, which contains over 11,000 digital images, focuses on the library’s “world-renowned collection of English caricatures and political satirical prints from the late-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Included are works by Bunbury, Woodward, Gillray, Rowlandson, and Newton, among others.” The Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections intersects with the Walpole Library’s Digital Collection as the latter is one of the former’s sources, but this websites indexes such satires by name and year.

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection

In terms of usability, both websites lack some help. The catalogue’s index is useful to the viewer who knows a particular print they’d like to find, or who is looking for something from a specific title, but the site features no searching capacities. The Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection has a search feature which looks through the call number, the artist, or the image’s title, but their images are not organized by important keywords or popular figures in the images. A search for “Rowlandson” can turn up a number of prints by this famous illustrator, but a careful search would need to be done to find the particular one where he satirizes the Prince of Wales who, during the 1788 Regency Crisis when King George III was thought to be mad, schemed to take over the throne.

Image Credit: The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Since both collections deal with images held by research libraries and museums (like the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art), all of these images are under copyright. Both websites are open to the public to use, and all of the images are available for personal use and even “study purposes,” so their use in the classroom should be fine.

What these websites might help provide for students in rhetoric classrooms is the opportunity to analyze visual material whose context is less familiar to them, but which was popularly produced and reproduced to do specific cultural work. Since most of these prints are satires, they can be compared in purpose and function to contemporary political cartoons in terms of their strategies. For educators focusing on the eighteenth-century, this material opens up and might indeed accompany a study of the popular period literature. I hope some of my readers here at viz. will find this material useful for their classrooms.

Many Ways to Map: The David Rumsey Map Collection Database

Laura T. Smith — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:08:22 +0000

(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

According to the Rumsey Collection, students commonly drew maps as part of their geography lessons, but Henshaw’s is a rare, extant example of this accompanying compositional and artistic activity. Interestingly, the figures that resemble ellipses and x’s in the diagram suggest the running stitches and cross-stitches native to a needlework sampler; in this way, the geographical diagram (included in a book of penmanship) seems to evoke the needlework samplers also frequently used to teach letters, spelling, and reading in early American schools.

Henshaw’s diagrams, rare finds, are among the 20,000 cartographic artifacts collected, preserved, and made readily, digitally available through the David Rumsey Map Collection Database, another one of the exceptional image archives we’d like to draw attention to in preparation for our upcoming workshop on “Best Practices for Digital Images,” coming up this Friday, March 26th at 1 pm. The full Rumsey Collection, including all non-digitized items, includes over 150,000 items. The Collection has particularly strong holdings in rare 18^th and 19^th century maps of North and South America, but it has vast resources in many other areas as well. While the Collection began 25 years ago, digitization began in 1996. Information about the Collections’ newest acquisitions and features is available on the regularly updated blog.

One of the strongest features of the David Rumsey Map Collection Database is the range of ways it allows viewers to view and download maps. All digitized resources are available for download in six to eight sizes, from small thumbnails to extra large, high-resolution files up to 12288 pixels. But the Rumsey Collection is perhaps especially astute in the methods it offers for viewing or browsing the Collection: the primary way to view the Collection is through the robust LUNA browser. (LUNA Imaging is also one of Rumsey’s projects.) The LUNA browser gives the researcher tremendous control of the browsing and searching experience, allowing her to select the size (small, medium, large) and number (50, 100, 250) of thumbnails that will be tiled on a page for browsing. Basic searches are allowed by resource type, map area, map creator, and map date, and advanced search functionality is also available. The Collection has also partnered with Google, Second Life, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to make Rumsey Historical Maps viewable in 3-D through Google Maps, Google Earth, and GIS maps.

(Image Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection)

Lastly, the maps are viewable through a “Collections Ticker” that presents an ongoing horizontal stream of randomized map thumbnails. The ticker is a free-standing, thin horizontal bar that launches separately from the Map Collection and can stay on your screen while you work in other applications. It takes roughly eight hours for the entire Rumsey Database to scroll across the ticker.

Advertising in America

Andi — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:39:45 +0000

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.

The Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 is housed at the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History as part of the Duke University Libraries. The database is home to over 9,000 images from the early period in American advertising. Because the strength of this collection centers on the period of increasing professionalization within the field of commercial advertising and the rise of national print magazines, this database holds many many images that will be of use to those of us who work with visual culture. Moreover, the ability to access so many early advertisements may provide several unique opportunities for the use of these images in our classroom. Obviously, these images would be useful for any unit providing a history to advertising in this early period but I also think that access to so many early ads might offer some contextualization for popular advertising campaigns today. Introducing students to these earlier advertisements may help to denaturalize to pervasive nature of contemporary marketing tools.

The database is easily searchable—especially fun is to use the search function to look up early advertisements for particular products. Typing in “perfume” or “soap” or “cola,” for instance, yields several fascinating results. Browsing through the collection strengths was also amusing—the database has designated pages for the history of specific campaigns, including Pond’s, Kodak, as well as for the history of particular types of advertising strategies, including broadsides, trading cards, calendars, and advertising cookbooks. I hope this resource proves as useful for your research and your pedagogy as it might for your entertainment.

Alternative Archives: Radical Software

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:47:26 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Radical Software

H/T: Chris Micklethwait

As Noel prepares to lead a Best Practices for Digital Images workshop here at UT, the rest of us in the Visual Rhetoric group hope to make some of this work public here on viz. for others to use. One website that presents some interesting work done in the 1970s that theorizes the use and creation of digital/video media is Radical Software.

Radical Software was created, according to its website, out of the work of a group called the Raindance Foundation which hoped to be “an alternative media think tank; a source of ideas, publications, videotapes and energy providing a theoretical basis for implementing communication tools in the project of social change.” A part of this work involved publishing a magazine called Radical Software that discussed in various ways the power of technology (principally video) to transmit diverse and alternative messages. What the creators of this website have done is to scan all of the issues of Radical Software (published between 1970 and 1974) as PDFs and make them available to the public for searching and browsing.

Image Credit: Radical Software

What really struck me in looking over the website is the relevance that some of their theorizing might have for individuals working in education and digital humanities today. Their last issue on “Video and Kids” features a number of individuals reflecting on the ways in which they’ve used video in the classroom not only to teach students material but also to show children ways of producing their own work. This is something that the Internet itself has further democratized as the tools required now for digital interaction have become cheaper and the knowledge to use them is ready to hand. What also intrigued me is that Radical Software from the first viewed their work as open-source and encouraged readers to copy freely from it. This more open attitude seems to mirror the kind of work done today by publications like Kairos, which not only offer space for more creative kinds of scholarship but also lower the wall preventing the public from accessing it.

I found it fairly easy to navigate the site and browse between issues, although having each article be its own separate PDF on themakes it harder to read through an entire issue. (Luckily, they do have full issues in PDF, but they're available only by clicking on the cover of the issue and not visible under the contents section, which makes this feature harder to find.) The search itself is also easy to use, although it appears that the articles haven’t been associated with likely keywords: while a search on “education” yields 155 results, “pedagogy” finds none. If there were any improvement that could be made to this site, this would be helpful, but the website appears to be designed—like the magazine itself once was—for easy access by others. I hope anyone interested in the evolution of digital literacy and the use of technology will find this a useful resource.

Google Earth Pedagogies: Making the Most of Map Databases

Laura T. Smith — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:10:47 +0000

(Image source: Library of Congress Map Collections)

The above map, created by George Washington in 1766, depicts “A plan of my farm on Little Huntg. Creek & Potomk.” This map, which is publicly viewable at the Library of Congress Map Collections and downloadable as a high-resolution JPEG2000 file, is included in the Collections’ “Cultural Landscapes” section, which highlights the ongoing cultural construction of United States and World landscapes through the ways individuals, communities, and nations modify land. This subsection of the online Collection places an array of cartographic materials into conversation: a set of local maps authored by George Washington, a series of maps of Liberia created by the American Colonization Society, and a store of historical U.S. atlases.

One of the distinguishing features of The Library of Congress’s Map Collection is that it is part database, part exhibit. The online Collection boasts sophisticated cataloguing and imaging standards, allowing users to zoom in on maps, examine details, download high-resolution image files, and refer to helpful notes about the map’s physical features and provenance, including scale, media, size, accompanying materials, and source. The site also offers helpful advice about copyright, noting that materials in the collection are generally not copyrighted materials; the maps “were either published prior to 1922, produced by the United States government, or both.” The site clearly aims to make the Library’s cartographic collections freely available and digitally accessible and to encourage users to download and use these materials for study, education, research, and enjoyment. The site intersects at many points with the Library’s larger “American Memory” project, which has digitized over five million items from the Library’s Collections since 1996.

I am interested in the possibilities of a maps database such as the Library of Congress Map Collections partly because of the prospect of using historical maps within Google Earth, and partly because our Visual Rhetoric workgroup is preparing to host an upcoming workshop, “Best Practices for Digital Images” on Friday March 26^th at 1 pm. One component of the workshop will be an introduction to the many rich image databases that are available on the web. To that end, some of our posts over the next few weeks will serve to review and evaluate some of these databases.

Three significant, online map databases are The Library of Congress Map Collections, the Perry-Castanada Map Collection at the University of Texas Libraries, and the David Rumsey Map Collection.

These collections all have large holdings that are available to the public and offer downloadable images, though only the Library of Congress and the David Rumsey Collection offer consistently high-resolution downloads. (The Perry-Castanada Map Collection seems to prioritize keeping files to a manageable size for its users; the website claims that most of its images, usually JPEGS or PDFs, are kept to size standards of 200K to 300K.) These three collections, run by a federal organization, a public university, and a private company, respectively, vary widely in terms of cataloguing and indexing practices, image quality, image context, and general online experience.

My aim today will be to offer a very brief overview of the first two image collections, Library of Congress Map Collections and the Perry-Castanada Map Collection. (I'll discuss the Rumsey Collection in a later post.) I will give an expanded analysis of the features and utility of Library of Congress’s Collection for pedagogical applications.

The Library of Congress Map Collections, the online arm of the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division, represents a small fraction of the holdings of the Map Division’s collection, which includes more than 4.5 million items. The Library of Congress Map Collections began as a massive digitizing project in 1995. The Library does not estimate how many maps are online, but notes that new materials are digitized and added continually.

The Perry-Castanada Map Collection includes more than 250,000 maps, 11,000 of which are available for online viewing. (In addition, maps from the Perry-Castanada Map Collection can also be physically checked out by students, faculty, or the general public for a two-week borrowing period.) As I noted above, the Perry-Castanada Collection does not prioritize providing high-resolution images or downloads of their materials; their files, generally formatted as JPEGs, GIFs, or PDFs, are considerably smaller than those of the other two sites. The Perry-Castanada Collection does offer categorized links to hundreds of other map collections though, including the Library of Congress and The Rumsey Collection, as well as other research collections and independent web sites.

While each digitized map is indexed in the Library’s general catalogue, the Maps Collection does not include the catalogue information or a link to the catalogue entries, so, in fact, the amount of information about the map available with the image is minimal, usually including the title of the map or atlas in which it was printed, its publication date, and sometimes the organization that published or produced it. The user has to separately look up the map in the online catalogue to obtain full information. The full catalogue entries offer additional information such as the map’s author, but the general purpose catalogue does not give the depth of information one might expect from a special collections catalogue entry, including detailed notes about medium, size, inscriptions, accompany materials, or provenance.

As I noted earlier, the Library of Congress Map Collection works like a database and an online exhibit at once. The materials are indexed via a number of different methods: the whole collections is divided into seven major thematic categories, which allow users topical entry into the cartographic resources. Those categories include

“Cities and Towns” (which includes a number of panoramic maps, a cartographic style popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries)
“Conservation and Environment” (including the subcollection, “Mapping the National Parks”)
“Discovery and Exploration”
“Cultural Landscapes”
“Military Battles and Campaigns” (including American Revolution and Civil War maps)
“Transportation and Communication” (including a collection of Railroad Maps)
“General Maps”

Nearly every collection includes a “Special Presentation,” an online exhibition with text and images that invites users to delve into some selected resources within the collection, rather than using the site by entering specific search terms. This feature allows users to have a curated, museum experience, clearly serving not only the Library’s goal of making documents available to the public, but also its educational goals.

While users can browse within these thematic categories, which include their own Collection Guides, users can also search by keyword, or browse indexes by geographic location, subject, map creator, or map title.

Indeed, as the above list of browse-able indexes suggests, the site relies heavily on browsing to make its resources available to users. For example, as the visitor enters the Railroad Maps Collection, she finds only a very cursory introduction to the collection—a total of five lines of text—on its home page, and this Collection happens to include no curated “Special Presentation” to introduce the user to the Collection’s material, so searching or browsing become her best methods of accessing information. Fortunately, the Geographic Location Index offers a robust, visual, clickable map icons to help users locate materials by country (Canada, United States, Mexico, and West Indies), U.S. region, and U.S. state.

In this way, the Library of Congress Map Collections site combines sophisticated cataloguing methods with an inviting, browse-able online environment. The icons that accompany the seven thematic categories perhaps best express this mission of the site: each is a collage of multiple materials from the category, with numbers identifying the source of each element of the collage, which are clickable:

(Image source: Library of Congress Map Collections)

The Cultural Landscapes icon, for example, pairs a detail from the 1766 Washington map (pictured in full at top) with a detail from an 1867 American Colonization Society map, “St. Pauls River, Liberia at its mouth.” The clickable collage, which links to each element's catalogue page, represents the site’s values: user-based discovery (facilitated by either browsing or searching), curated experience, thematic intersections, accessibility, and high-quality image and cataloguing standards. By clicking on the category icon, the user not only enters the "Cultural Landscapes" section, but is confronted by provocatively juxtaposed visuals accompanied by links to each detailed source page.

Not surprisingly, the site offers extensive materials for teachers, including classroom ideas, lesson plans, and primary source sets (groups of images related to a historical period or theme) through its “Collection Connections” section.

The Collection’s choice of somewhat unusual file formats for images is, perhaps, an unfortunate extension of the value placed, at once, on accessibility and high quality that I appreciate throughout most of the site. Rather than offering more common image file formats such as TIFFs GIFS, or JPEGS, the Library has chosen to compress their large documents as JPEG2000 and MrSID files to preserve detail and enable high-resolution downloads. Both of these formats require plug-ins, and while the site offers links to free versions, I would have liked to have available a low-resolution option (a GIF or JPEG) that required no software plug-in.

Viz. Workshop on March 26

noelradley — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:10:25 +0000

Viz. will be hosting a workshop at the end of March, here at the University of Texas. Click through to the DWRL page to read more.