Paintings Can Still Get you in Trouble

Art is still a powerful form of protest. This painting of Vladimir Putin in lingerie was seized from a gallery in St. Petersburg. Police said it broke unspecified laws.Art as Protest

Useful Google Image Trick

This was news to me, so I thought I would share it. Below is a quotation from an image librarian on my listserv:

"Whenever you want to know what an image is - right click or control click on the image - and click Save Image as... - save to your desktop. Then go to Google Images and simply pick up the image and drop it in the Image Search bar and VOILA! all the info you could possibly want on the image."

This worked for me, more or less  I had a scanned image of a Teco vase and Google offered me images of skinny green things, so basically I stumped Google. But when I inserted an image of a mosaic from Pompeii that I had found on-line, Google Image came up with both more pictures of the same thing and a written suggestion of what the mosaic was.  Pretty cool!

ARTstor News

There are some changes at ARTstor to correct some image download problems.  

ARTstor Digital Library image downloads will now come via zip files.Check here for complete information.

 

True Colors

When can we trust our eyes and how do we evaluate the rich resources that the web brings to us.  Technologists and artists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg have made a wonderful mosaic of image search results that can help us think about visualization.

"The web can seem like the perfect museum, holding all the world’s art. Type “Danae Klimt” into your favorite search engine, and you conjure up a high-resolution image of Gustav Klimt’s Danaë: tan limbs, a shower of gold, red hair.

Or did you find pink limbs? Or were they gray or even green? There’s the rub: the seemingly perfect museum holds dozens of Danaës—with dozens of different palettes. Even the shape changes as reproductions are subtly cropped.
Curious just how far reproductions stray from each other, we began an investigation. (Go directly to the results if you like.) For a set of famous artworks, we downloaded all the plausible copies we could find. Then we wrote software to reconstruct each artwork as a mosaic, a patchwork quilt where each patch comes from an individual copy."

From the web site of technologists and artists, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. "We invent new ways for people to think and talk about data."  http://hint.fm/

ARTstor Keeps on Growing!

Imagine a free national library of images! It is happening and coming our way.

ARTstor is partnering with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to provide access to more than 10,000 high-quality images from six leading museums.This is great news for users. Single portal access to an ever greater and more diverse sea of images!

Check out the DPLA to see what they are all about here: http://dp.la/

Iliad in the News!

Geneticists are backing up classicists and agreeing on a date for Homer's Iliad.

Saying that language behaves extraordinarily like genes, the scientists agree with an 9th C. BCE date for the celebrated epic.  The scientists tracked the words in the "Iliad" the way they would track genes in a genome, using a tool known as the Swadesh word list. To read more and see the fascinating way that genetics, classics and linguistics can come together, check out this link

Getty Guide to Imagery

Looking for more information on a research topic?  Try this resource sponsored by the Getty to find resources on art topics. It looks very intriguing.

Getty Guide to Imagery