Good news: Shared Shelf subscribers can now bulk-publish image files and associated metadata to collections in Omeka.net.
With the Shared Shelf Link plugin, metadata is mapped to Omeka’s Dublin Core fields from customizable schemas in Shared Shelf to publish projects to an Omeka.net site.
To get started using this plugin, contact Shared Shelf Support.
Want to find out more about Shared Shelf? Watch this short video.
Ordered by Shapur I | Dam and Bridge at Shushtar; c. 260 | Shushtar, Iran | Islamic Art and Architecture Collection (Sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom, Walter Denny)
Congratulations to the five winners of this year’s ARTstor Travel Awards! They will each receive $1,500 to be used for their teaching and research travel needs over the course of the next year. The winning essays and accompanying images will be posted in the blog in the near future.
Our thanks to everyone who submitted an essay. Our committee was very impressed by the creative ways that our users integrate the images in the ARTstor Digital Library into their teaching and research. We hope to feature notable submissions from runners up in the blog throughout the year.
The ARTstor Travel Awards 2013 winning essays are:
Peyvand Firouzeh, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge
Shushtar: A Town to Tame Water
The aridity of the Middle East stands in contrast to the landscape architecture of Islamic gardens, where water is used generously and luxuriously. The contrast hints at creative methods of dealing with water scarcity: from man-made canals and reservoirs to cisterns and qanats (subterranean tunnel-wells). Firouzeh focuses on Shushtar, a town in southwest Iran, by looking at the ways its inhabitants applied to tame water, making the nearby river not only a resource for the essentials, but also an amenity for leisure.
Lisa Hartley, Student Services Associate, Columbus College of Art Design
Wrapped Up in Lace: Chantilly
Coco Chanel called lace “one of the prettiest imitations ever made of the fantasy of nature,” and Hartley introduces us to Chantilly, the tiny town in France where the craft originated. The traditions and skills used there date back as early as the 16th century, when European nobility commissioned workers to create dresses, parasols, shawls, and gloves in beautiful openwork fabric.
Anne C. Leader, Art History Professor, Savannah College of Art and Design-Atlanta
Florence: City of the Living, City of the Dead
While the primary motivation for patrons of religious architecture and decoration was to gain or retain God’s grace, Florentine tomb monuments manifest a conflicting mix of piety and social calculation, reflecting tension between Christian humility and social recognition. Leader’s essay reconstructs the rich mosaic of tomb markers that once covered the floors, walls, and yards of the Florentine cityscape to bring us closer to how Florentines experienced the deaths and memories of their kin, friends, and competitors in the early modern city.
Marlene Nakagawa, Undergraduate student at the University of Oregon
Alexandria: The City
From Pakistan to Turkey, Alexander the Great founded or renamed nearly twenty cities after himself as a representation of his omnipresence in the ancient world. Over the centuries, most of these Alexandrian cities have been destroyed, renamed, or absorbed into other territories. Nakagawa introduces to the major exception: Alexandria, Egypt’s largest seaport, which continues to be a dynamic force in the country’s ancient and modern economy.
Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture, Tulane University
Washington’s Secret City: Cultural Capital
African Americans made up from a quarter to a third of Washington, D.C.’s population throughout the nineteenth century, and historian Constance Green characterized the capital in the early 1900s as the “undisputed center of American Negro civilization.” This population peaked between 1960 and 1990. Wiley’s submission tells the story of African Americans in Washington and their significant contribution to the nation’s capital since its founding in 1790.
Left: Jeanne Lanvin | Ensemble, Evening; Summer 1923. Right: Jeanne Lanvin | Suit, Evening (Tuxedo); 1927. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
“I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The recent movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby has turned the spotlight on the fashion and styles of the Roaring Twenties. So what made the twenties roar?
The economic boom was decisive. Soldiers came home from World War I to jobs in manufacturing plants ready to turn from war production to consumer goods; with the flourishing economy, many commodities became affordable for the first time. Another key engine for progress was the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. It was signed into law in 1920, heralding unprecedented liberation. The twenties were also a pivotal time for mass communication: radio, cinema, and the automobile sped up the distribution of information—and trends.
Alfred Jacob Miller | Roasting The Hump Rib, 1858-1860 | The Walters Art Museum
May is National Barbecue Month, allegedly. Why the hedging? Because the closest to an official citation we could find was this post on the USDA blog from 2012. But we’ll go with it because a) it gives us the excuse to post this mid-19th century watercolor from The Walters Art Museum, b) we like barbecue, and c) it’s close to lunchtime.
View this image in the Artstor Digital Library to read the metadata, which includes the artist’s mouthwatering description of how the ribs are cooked.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec | La Chaine Simpson (bicycle chains), 1896 | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com
May is National Bike Month! Did you know that there are more than a billion bicycles worldwide? Perhaps more surprisingly, the basic configuration of a bicycle hasn’t changed much from the chain-driven model developed around 1885.
Amed T. Thibault | Bicycle, Livery, Carriage, and Paint Shop Trade Sign, 1895-1905 | American Folk Art Museum; folkartmuseum.org
The first pedal-propelled bicycle was reputedly invented by Kirkpatrick MacMillan in Scotland in 1839. While not everyone agrees on his breakthrough, it is widely accepted that MacMillan was the first person to be charged with a cycling traffic offense in 1842 after he was fined five shillings for knocking over a little girl.
In the early 1860s, bicycle design was improved in France by a crank drive with pedals and a larger front wheel that allowed the rider to travel farther with every rotation of the pedals. The model soon developed into the “penny-farthing,” which boasted wheels with solid rubber tires mounted on a tubular steel frame. While certainly formidable-looking, the high placement of the seat and the poor weight distribution made it difficult to ride.
Papilionidae; swallowtail butterfly | Collected: 8/1975, Madagascar, Africa | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu
Spring time is here and butterflies are already making their annual appearance, according to butterfliesandmoths.org. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a slideshow of selections from a wide variety of eras, regions, and fields of study, from science to art to costume design.
Search the Artstor Digital Library for butterfl* to find more than 1,000 images with the keywords “butterfly” or “butterflies.”
Click on any image to view the slideshow and to read the full captions.
Our slideshow includes an image of a very serious-looking butterfly collector from George Eastman House; several examples from the nearly 70 specimens of butterflies in Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History; an 18th-century painting of a mischievous cat chasing a butterfly from Réunion des Musées Nationaux; a 1910 lithograph of the Ty-Bell Sisters, Aerial Butterflies from The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Circus Collection; a colorful illumination from the Book of Hours of Queen Isabella I, ca. 1495-1500, from The Cleveland Museum of Art Collection; and an evening dress and a bonnet from more than two dozen butterfly-themed dresses and accessories in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Brooklyn Museum Costumes.
We are constantly adding new content to the ARTstor Digital Library, and searches you performed in the past will very likely yield additional results in the future. Did you know you can now save search parameters to easily run the same search again?
After you perform a search, you will see an option to Save this search in the upper right of the thumbnail page of search results. Click on it, then click Save and enter a name for your saved search. You can save up to 30 searches.
To run a saved search record, click My saved searches near the search box on the front page of the Digital Library or on a search results page.
Done with a particular saved search? To delete it, click on My saved searches, then click on the X next to the search you want to delete. You’ll see a prompt asking if you want to delete it; click Yes and you’re finished.
Antoni Gaudí | La Pedrera (Mila House) | 1906-1910 | Image and original data provided by Shmuel Magal, Sites and Photos; sites-and-photos.com
The Artstor Travel Awards are back and they are now open to undergraduate students! This year the theme is cities: their histories and development, their depictions in art and documentation, their architecture, their ruins, their governments, their peoples, their myths.
Create an Artstor image group or groups and a single essay of 500 words or less that creatively introduces us to a city or cities we did not know or reveals an intriguing aspect of the cities we do know. Five winners— college and graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians in any field—will receive $1,500 each to help support travel-related educational and scholarly activities. Winning essays and other selected submissions will be published on the Artstor Blog, Artstor website, and via our social media channels. Deadline extended to Tuesday, May 28.
Marinus van Reymerswaele | Tax Collector and His Wife | c. 1540 | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com
Since 1955, Tax Day has typically fallen on April 15 for those living in the United States. You might derive some comfort from knowing that your feelings today were not unknown in the 16th century, as evidenced in these three Netherlandish paintings of tax collectors by Marinus van Reymerswaele from the Art, Archaeology and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives) collection in the ARTstor Digital Library.
Incidentally, we’re puzzled by the ornate hats, which presumably were part of the profession’s costume. If you know anything about them, please leave a comment below. If you’re not too busy filing your taxes at the last minute, of course.
For over twenty years, Panos Pictures has been using photography to communicate critical social issues and stories beyond the mainstream media landscape to new and diverse audiences. More than 30,000 of their images of contemporary global affairs are currently available in the Artstor Digital Library.
In this Panos-produced video, Ami Vitale shares the story behind a photograph she took when she lived in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa.
Search the Digital Library for Ami Vitale and Alio to see this and other photographs she took of the Fulani child, or just for her name to find more than 1,000 of her poignant photographs.
You may also be interested in these other videos from Panos:
