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

American Landscape Painting and the Civil War

In this opinion piece in the New York Times,  Eleanor Jones Harvey, curator at the Smithsonian Institution, argues that although American painters avoided directly painting scenes of the Civil War, their fascination with natural phenomena and meteorology provide commentary on our national upheaval.  americas-moral-volcano

3D interactive history of Paris

Hey, Fans of history, architecture, classics and French language! Check out this 3-D visualization of Paris through time. The creaters, Dassault Systèmes say "with the help of historians and archeologists, Dassault has created Paris 3D, an interactive model that transports any Internet user through two millennia of the city's history."

It looks a little like a video game, but a high quality one created with the help of scholars.

 

3-D Paris

Solving the Problem of Seeing and Finding

I was just using the new facial recognition software in I-Photo, and while it is kind of a kick to see who the computer thinks is in a photo, it is not very accurate. A  little kid could do a much better job of figuring out who or even what is being shown. Computer scientists are working madly on how to create a computer image search engine that will be a lot closer to what we humans do so effortlessly. 

Check out this article; it will be great for more than art research if they can make it work: Seeking a Better Way to Find Web Images

Faker!

Interesting article in the New York Times about art that has been identified as a forgery reappearing on the market after having been resold as an authentic work.  What should be done with fakes? Indelible markings? Destruction? Let them be? What do you think? Read more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/arts/design/murky-laws-give-fake-artworks-a-future-as-real-ones.html?smid=pl-share

Art and Science, Better Together

 Oh celestial blue, half of humans name you as their favorite color. This is a great article about the very nature of blue. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/science/with-new-findings-scientists-are-captivated-by-the-color-blue.html?smid=pl-share