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Introduction | Questionnaire Summary | Field Agenda | Readings /Websites
DIGITAL DIALOGUES Jeffrey Cohen, Director, Digital Media and Resource Center, Bryn Mawr College, PLACES IN TIME: Historical Documentation of Place in Greater Philadelphia This project is an effort to bring together some resources -- images, documents, tools, and links -- for pursuing historical information about place in the five-county Philadelphia area: Bucks, Chester, Delaware. Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties. The overarching idea is to use new media to more effectively disseminate information about place, to enhance cross-institutional access to documentary materials of this sort, to better connect people with the history of their environment, and to thus enrich their lives here. The Society of Architectural Historians Image Exchange At the annual meeting in St. Louis in April 1996, an idea of image sharing on the Web (or possibly on CD) was proposed and discussed. The idea would be for members to contribute their own slides of buildings, things they could volunteer for shared educational use. These would then be scanned at a consistent standard, and made available freely to members and students over the Web for non-profit educational use, for use on monitors and through projection in the classroom. Plans and additional graphics might be sought among older volumes clearly in the public domain. We have begun as an initial foray a pilot project on American architecture, a survey widely taught, for which many SAHers will have readily available images, and one for which the copyright rules may tend to be slightly more clear (if only slightly). Elaine Koss, Deputy Director, College Art Association CAA.Reviews, published by the College Art Association, is an online publication devoted to the peer review of new books relevant to the fields of art history. Bernard Reilly, Director of Research and Access, Chicago Historical Society Haymarket Affair Web Project (for the live component) Web exhibition and on-line archive. See below for background. The second component, the on-line archive, has not yet been released on the Web, however, but will be within the next thirty days. The Chicago Historical Society's Haymarket Affair Digital Project In 1998 the Chicago Historical Society was awarded a Library of Congress / Ameritech National Digital Library competition grant to create an on-line archive of all CHS primary source materials on the Haymarket Affair. What is known as the Haymarket Affair consisted of a series of events centering upon a violent confrontation between labor activists and the Chicago police in May 1886, and the subsequent trial and execution of several prominent anarchists. The Affair was a pivotal moment in the history of the American labor movement, and the Chicago Historical Society holds many of the critical contemporary documents of the events and a number of related museum artifacts. The Haymarket Digital Project, when completed, will consist of two on-line components:
The Dramas of Haymarket is viewable on the Web at http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/index.htm. The Haymarket Affair Digital Archive will be available in October. David Silver, Director, Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies is an online, not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to research, study, teach, support, and create diverse and dynamic elements of cyberculture. Collaborative in nature, RCCS seeks to establish and support ongoing conversations about the emerging field, to foster a community of students, scholars, teachers, explorers, and builders of cyberculture, and to showcase various models, works-in-progress, and on-line projects. Currently, the site contains a collection of scholarly resources, including university-level courses in cyberculture, events and conferences, an extensive full-length book reviews each month. During the 1998-1999 academic year, RCCS sponsored the Cyberculture Working Group, a collection of University of Maryland and neighboring graduate students and faculty members from across the disciplines interested in exploring cyberculture through a series of symposia, workshops, and community service projects. Miriam Stewart, Associate Curator of Drawings, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums The Sargent site was designed in 1995-96 by Melinda Linderer, who was the Drawing Department intern. The site contains records for more than 400 drawings, 35 sketchbooks, 33 paintings, 4 sculptures, and even the artist's brushes, watercolor tubes, and palette, most of which have never been published. The information (which includes images if available and full catalogue data) is drawn from our in-house database. The collection can be searched by keyword(s) (charcoal and Boston Public Library project, for example) or through a full text search. The website continues to be a great resource for scholars, students, and the interested public. In 1999, when there were four exhibitions in Boston devoted to Sargent, we added a section on the Boston Public Library murals. The murals, which are difficult to see and interpret, were examined and dusted by conservators at the Harvard University Art Museums. The conservators had taken useful slides, which were scanned and mounted on our site, and are linked to the Boston Public Library site. The greatest frustration so far has been our inability to update the data on the site. The Harvard University Art Museums switched from one database to another, more powerful database in 1997. For complicated technical reasons, the Sargent site has still been running on the old database. In the meantime, we have continued to add new information to the Sargent records to the new database, and have added nearly 800 records for individual pages in the 35 sketchbooks. This summer we were finally able to begin to work on the site again, and are currently testing a new search engine that will link to the new database. We plan to have the new search engine and the revised and updated site mounted by the end of the year. The Ben Shahn at Harvard website was developed to complement the exhibition "Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times," organized by the Fogg (currently on tour; opening at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU on November 14, 2000). The exhibition was supported by a grant from the NEH, and featured a strong educational component, which is reflected in the website. The site, which was based on the Sargent site, includes Family and Teachers guides and scholarly sections devoted to different aspects of Shahn's work. It was envisioned as a resource for scholars and the general public interested in American documentary photography of the mid-century as well as 1930s culture and social history. The collection--comprising nearly 4,000 images--includes many negatives, which are displayed on the site both as negatives and "inverted" positives. |
