source: https://marieelia.wordpress.com/journal/
REYKJAVIK, ICELAND — It wasn’t exactly a beach day. It was a chilly, damp November morning with a drizzle that turned intermittently to rain.Björk called it “sniffle weather”; she and a video crew were at Grotta, a lighthouse on a spit of land on the coast here that she has often rented for stretches of isolated songwriting. The tide and fleeting winter daylight gave her only a few hours to make the video that, if all goes as planned, will turn “Stonemilker,” the first song on her new album, “Vulnicura” (One Little Indian), into the virtual-reality finale of the Björk retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art that opens on March 8.
Björk was, as she has so often placed herself throughout her career, on the cusps of nature and technology, raw emotion and complex artifice. She often calls herself a “pop musician,” but that’s a humble understatement for an artist who, over the past three decades, has constantly experimented with sounds, structures and images around the elemental communication of her gentle, searing voice.
She was a preteenage pop singer — releasing her first album at 12 — and then the frontwoman of the Sugarcubes, Iceland’s celebrated art-punk band. Since 1992, she has made adventurous solo albums that, for all their eccentricities, have been international hits. Working with designers and directors, she has also enfolded herself in the kind of enigmatic, memorable images that made her appealing to MoMA — not least of them the unforgettable swan dress she wore to the 2001 Academy Awards, in which her effigy will preside over the public lobby during the exhibition.
More at NYT
Twenty years ago next week, the artist Ray Johnson jumped off a low bridge in Sag Harbor, N.Y., and backstroked placidly out to sea. Two teenage girls saw him plunge into the frigid water and tried to alert the police, but when they found the station closed they went to see a movie instead, a detail many of Mr. Johnson’s friends said would have delighted him. Why he took his life at the age of 67 — when he was healthy, had money in the bank for the first time and was one of the most revered underground artists of the last half of the 20th century — is a question none of those friends have been able to answer. (The poet Diane di Prima wrote angrily: “I can’t imagine what you thought you were doing/what was the point of jumping off that bridge/after so many years of playing it cool.”) But in many ways Mr. Johnson conducted his death exactly as he had conducted his life and his work — enigmatically, defiantly on his own terms and with an intense privacy that somehow coexisted with a compulsively public persona. [more — source: NYT]
Photograph of Nigel Henderson via Nigel Henderson Estate
If you’re like me, one of the first items on your itinerary when you hit a new city is the art museums. Of course one, two, even three or four visits to the world’s major collections can’t begin to exhaust the wealth of painting, sculpture, photography, and more contained within. Rotating and special exhibits make taking it all in even less feasible. That’s why we’re so grateful for the digital archives that institutions like the Getty, LA County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and theBritish Library make available free online. Now another museum, Britain’s Tate Modern, gets into the digital archive arena with around 70,000 digitized works of art in their online gallery.
“Sketch of the bus stop” from the estate of Josef Herman
But wait, there’s more. Much more. A separate digital archive—the Tate’sArchives & Access project—offers up a trove of materials you’re unlikely to encounter much, if at all, in their physical spaces. That’s because this collection digitizes little-seen “artists’ materials, including photographs, sketchbooks, diaries, letters and objects, documenting the lives and working processes of British born and émigré artists, from 1900 to the present.” These include, writes The Guardian, “the love letters of painter Paul Nash, the detailed sculpture records of Barbra Hepworth, and 3,000 photographs by Nigel Henderson, providing a behind-the-scenes backstage look at London’s 1950s jazz scene.” Thus far, the Tate has uploaded about 6,000 items, “including 52 collections relating to 79 artists.” At the Tate archive, you’ll find photographs like that of painter and photographer Nigel Henderson (see top of the post) and also paintings by the highly regarded Polish-British realist, Josef Herman (right above).
“Squared-up drawings of soldiers” via The estate of David Jones
You’ll find preliminary sketches like the 1920-21 Squared-up drawings of soldiers by painter and poet David Jones, above, one of 109 sketches and two sketchbooks available by the same artist. You’ll find letters like that below, written by sculptor Kenneth Armitage to his wife Joan Moore in 1951—one of hundreds. These are but the tiniest sampling of what is now “but a drop in the ocean,” The Guardian writes, “given the more than 1 million items in the [physical] archive.” Archive head Adrian Glew calls the collection “a national archival treasure” that is also “for the enrichment of the whole world.”
Letter from Kenneth Armitage to Joan Moore via the The Kenneth Armitage Foundation
The remainder of the digitized Archives & Access collection—52, 000 items in total—should be available by the summer of 2015. While viewing art and artifacts online is certainly no substitute for seeing them in person, it’s better than never seeing them at all. In any case, millions of pieces are only viewable by curators and specialists and never make their way to gallery floors. But with the appearance and expansion of free online archives like the Tate’s, that situation will shift dramatically, opening up national treasures to independent scholars and ordinary art lovers the world over.
Related Content:
The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse & Remix
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use
The National Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Artwork Freely Available Online
LA County Museum Makes 20,000 Artistic Images Available for Free Download
source: http://www.openculture.com/
The “Alternet” is one of three side-by-side installations that make up “Artists in the Archives: A Collection of Card Catalogs,” an exhibition that revitalizes library tools rendered obsolete by digital technology in the mid-1990s. Each installation includes a card catalog filled with art: the “Alternet” consists of works by 75 artists, “Book Marks” is the creation of a single artist, and “The Call to Everyone” contains contributions by several hundred members of the public. “The Call to Everyone,” a work in progress, was conceived by JoAnne Wilcox, a photographer who lives in Westville, Conn. She invited the public to take cellphone photographs and then, following her detailed instructions, print them onto selections from her collection of now-antiquated cards and submit them to the project. To date, she has accumulated about 1,000 pieces (including her own), which she has randomly interspersed in a 25-drawer catalog among multitudes of as-yet-unadorned, cream-colored cards. In one of those drawers, Ms. Wilcox located an image of an elderly, gnarled hand resting on the lime-green fabric of a dress. The words showing through the photograph announced the card’s former life in the catalog: the author, “Read, Piers Paul”; the book, “Alive.” “My neighbor shot this of her grandmother, who is a Holocaust survivor,” Ms. Wilcox, 42, said. “How beautiful is it that she paired her with the title ‘Alive’?” She opened a different drawer and took out another piece — a pair of scruffy brown shoes on the card for Jonathan Kellerman’s “Victims,” the words “SUSPENSE FICTION” typed across the top. “People choose cards that appeal to them,” Ms. Wilcox said, “and the images they juxtapose with the words create something new. Each card tells its own tale.” The cards in the “Alternet” also tell tales, these intended to reflect daily acts of creativity. In late 2011, Ms. Johnson, of Peekskill, asked dozens of artists to spend a year developing projects using 300 cards. The results include narratives, abstractions, political statements, historical contemplations and journalistic musings presented through drawings, paintings, collages, photographs, found materials, computer-generated imagery and text. Each set is displayed in a designated card catalog drawer. Charles McGill, of Peekskill, produced a commentary on racial stereotyping, with card after card of statements like “My name was never Shaft or Black Caesar” and “I have never wanted straight hair.” Victoria M. Zeph, of Kent Cliffs (and the chef at Zephs’ Restaurant in Peekskill), filled her drawer with photographs she took of clothes drying on clotheslines. “Clotheslines are a fitting subject for a card catalog,” Ms. Johnson, 66, said. “You don’t see many of either anymore.” Equally rare are the library “due date” cards in the third installation, “Book Marks,” that Barbara Page, an artist who lives near Ithaca, embellished with drawings, rubber stamps and collage elements. The finished pieces depict her memories of the books that the cards once occupied. On the card for Françoise Gilot’s “Life With Picasso,” for instance, Ms. Page stamped the image of a lone paintbrush amid lists of old dates. She stamped the card forEric Carle’s “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” with red strawberries eaten away by hole-punched holes. So far, Ms. Page, 69, has made approximately 500 cards, for books including the Bible and “Fahrenheit 451.” “I didn’t love all the books, but they all made an impression on me,” she said. “The cards hold bits of those impressions. The role of memory is incredibly important in this piece.” At the library, “Book Marks” is enclosed in a glass case, with 50 cards laid out on shelves alongside a two-drawer card catalog that contains the rest of Ms. Page’s collection. The cards are arranged in the order she read the books, and as such, she considers the project both a personal history and a cultural time line. “I realized this wasn’t just a way to catalog books I’ve read,” she said, “but a way of looking at the evolution of our society over the last 60 years.” In addition to evoking a touch of nostalgia, “Artists in the Archives” underscores the importance of curiosity and serendipity. For one thing, the artwork is mostly in drawers. “You have to be curious enough to go over and browse through them,” Ms. Johnson said. She likened the act of flipping through the catalogs to a Google search. “But online it’s no longer a tactile, kinesthetic experience,” she said. “In the cards, there was more of a sense of discovery.” That discovery is key for Ms. Wilcox. “I want people to wander,” she said, “to stumble upon something they didn’t expect.” “Artists in the Archives: A Collection of Card Catalogs” is on view through Sept. 28 at the Greenburgh Public Library, 300 Tarrytown Road, Elmsford. The show will travel to the Chappaqua Library in October and the Field Library in Peekskill in December. For more information: (914) 721-8200 or greenburghlibrary.org.
source: NYT
18 partners from all over Europe – museums, archives and agencies – joined forces in the EuropeanaPhotography project to digitize the best of the early photographs (1839-1939) in their collections; now they are proud to present an edited selection of the finest, rarely seen, images of the past that were captured by the pioneers of photography.
All Our Yesterdays is a great opportunity to discover how citizens in Europe lived in a world very different from the one we know today. It was a period of great change, where a life of horses and agriculture briefly lived together, and made way to, the machines and industrialisation of the future. This rapid change included a new medium – photography – and it captured everyday life as quickly as the new world evolved. The skills of these early photographers were not fully appreciated at the time but they recorded life in a precise and hidden detail that we can only really appreciate now that we have lost the life we used to live.
All Our Yesterdays opens with a great event in Pisa, and it is also avirtual exhibition.
Everybody can join: bring your old family photos, they will be digitized and included as part of our cultural heritage. The History of Europe is your story too! [source]
Today in Cape Town, South Africa, at the OCLC Europe, Middle East and Africa Regional Council (EMEARC) Meeting, my colleagues Richard Wallis and Ted Fons made an announcement that should make all library coders and data geeks leap to their feet. I certainly did, and I work here. However, viewed from our perspective this is simply another step along a road that we set out on some time ago. More on that later, but first to the big news:
Let me dive into these one by one, although the link above to Richard’s post also has some great explanations.
One of the issues we have as librarians is to somehow relate all the various printings of a work. Think of Treasure Island, for example. Can you imagine how many times that has been published? It hardly seems helpful, from an end-user perspective, to display screen upon screen of different versions of the same work. Therefore, identifying which works are related can have a tremendous beneficial impact on the end user experience. We have now done that important work.
But we also want to enable others to use these associations in powerful new ways by exposing the data as linked (and linkable) open data on the web. To do this, we are exposing a variety of serializations of this data: Turtle, N-Triple, JSON-LD, RDF/XML, and HTML. When looking at the data, please keep in mind that this is an evolutionary process. There are possible linkages not yet enabled in the data that will be later. See Richard’s blog post for more information on this. The license that applies to this is the Open Data Commons Attribution license, or ODC-BY.
Although it is expected that the true use of this data will be by software applications and other linked data aggregations, we also believe it is important for humans to be able to see the data in an easy-to-understand way. Thus we are providing the data through a Linked Data Explorer interface. You will likely be wondering how you can obtain a work ID for a specific item, which Richard explains:
How do I get a work id for my resources? – Today, there is one way. If you use the OCLC xISBN, xOCLCNum web services you will find as part of the data returned a work id (eg. owi=”owi12477503”). By striping off the ‘owi’ you can easily create the relevant work URI:http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/12477503
In a very few weeks, once the next update to the WorldCat linked data has been processed, you will find that links to works will be embedded in the already published linked data. For example you will find the following in the data for OCLC number 53474380:
schema:exampleOfWorkhttp://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/12477503
As you can see, although today is a major milestone in our work to make the WorldCat data aggregation more useful and usable to libraries and others around the world, there is more to come. We have more work to do to make it as usable as we want it to be and we fully expect there will be things we will need to fix or change along the way. And we want you to tell us what those things are. But today is a big day in our ongoing journey to a future of actionable data on the web for all to use.
Quite often we hear the same stories of digital incidents and the rescue of the data on our preservation conferences. The most famous example perhaps is the BBC Domesday Book.This part of the Atlas of Digital Damages is intended to collect stories about incidents with digital material. How it was discovered and how the data were rescued (or not).
The current collection of stories all happened years ago and are based on literature I came across. We could learn from each other if more contemporary examples are added to this list, even if details are left out to avoid compromising an organisation.
You can help updating this overview by sending your contribution to info@atlasofdigitaldamages.info
Examples of data lost and regained (sometimes):
[source]