Drag and drop with Google images

If you’ve looked at Google images recently, you probably noticed a new feature: Search by Image. Just click on the camera icon in the search bar or drag and drop an image into the search bar and Google images will search for and retrieve visually similar images. I’ve been testing out a number of images but here is one example: Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut “Two Men Plotting Points for a Drawing of a Lute in Foreshortening” (ca. 1525). Google image recognized the print as a Dürer and found visually similar images. It may not be as accurate as your art history professor but its a still pretty cool.

Conservation images of Ghent Altarpiece available

The Getty Foundation and the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage have released high resolution images of Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece taken while the work was undergoing conservation in 2010. The project utilized high resolution macro photography under visible and infrared light, infrared reflectoography, X-radiography and dendrochronolgy to reveal valuable information on underdrawing, layer paint layer structure and other technical aspects of the altarpiece. Additional images of the conservation project will be made available over the next year.

Digital doodling devices

If you long for the days of pen and paper, don’t give up — consider turning your touch screen tablet, phone or computer into a virtual pen and paper. John Biggs, writing for the New York Times “Personal Tech” page, reviewed several new devices now on the market that enable users to draw or write directly onto a screen using digital pens.  A few examples: Thinkgeek.com’s Pogo Sketch, Wacom’s Bamboo Stylus,  N-trig’s DuoSense (pictured above) and Livescribe Echo. Among the apps to consider: PhatPad and Adobe Eazel. To read the complete review, go here.

What does a Digital Public Library of America look like?

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Steering Committee wants your help developing a national digital public library. To facilitate this goal, the DPLA has released Beta Sprint, an initiative that “seeks, ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, user interfaces, etc.—put forth as a written statement, a visual display, code, or a combination of forms—that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content.” Beta Sprint is where theory merges with reality, or as Doron Weber, Steering Committee member and Vice President of the Sloan Foundation, put it, “where the dream of a seamless and comprehensive digital library for every person begins to grapple, technically and creatively, with what has already been accomplished and what still needs to be developed.” Anyone interested in participating must submit a Statement of Interest by June 15.
For more information on the Digital Public Library of America, go to their wiki.
(sources: Beta Sprint Press Release, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard)

iPhone war photos: photojournalism or photography?

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Damon Winter’s ‘A Grunt’s Life‘, a photo essay capturing the daily life of US troops in an Afghanistan war zone with the use of the photographer’s iPhone, has won recent praise and an international photojournalism award. It has also stirred up some surprising controversy. The flap is not over the content — standard
photojournalism — or Winter’s use of an iPhone — also not unusual for photojournalists.  Rather, journalists and photojournalists are questioning whether Winter’s ‘fauxlaroids’ are telling the ‘truth. Winter relied on the iPhone app Hipstamatic which applies visual filters resulting in color-shifting and some distortion to create a moody atmosphere. For more on this debate about authenticity and photojournalism, go here, here and here.

Google’s ‘Art Project’

Google has partnered with several major international museums to present a new tool that allows users to explore galleries and view artworks online in extraordinary detail. The project is in its infancy but already 17 museums have agreed to participate and submit high resolution images.

Street View of 'The Ambassadors' at the National Gallery

Among the museums contributing are the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Gemäldegalerie (Berlin), the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA (New York City), Tate Britain and the National Gallery (London), Rijksmuseum and the van Gogh Museum (Netherlands), the Museo Reina Sofia and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), the Uffizi (Florence) and the Hermitage (St. Petersburg). Viewers can virtually explore museums using Google’s Street View and closely explore and zoom into selected paintings. Google has added a ‘Create an Artwork Collection’ feature that allows users to save views of artworks and build personalized collections with comments that can then be shared with friends. You can discover more at the ‘Art Project‘ website.

ARTstor now available through iPad, iPhone and iPad Touch

The ARTstor Digital Library is now accessible to registered ARTstor users through the iPad, iPhone, and the iPod Touch, providing read-only features such as searching and browsing, zooming, and viewing saved image groups. ARTstor is also introducing the Flashcard View for ARTstor Mobile, which allows users to test their knowledge by viewing the image without textual information, and then flipping the image to reveal the image record. This new view can be found under the “Views” menu as “Flashcard.” ARTstor Mobile is only available through the Safari browser. For more information, go to ARTstor’s Help page.

Will Smarthistory replace Art History textbooks?

Most art history students are painfully aware that Gardners Art Through the Ages and Stokstad’s Art History are some of the largest and heaviest textbooks around.  Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to lug those hefty books in your backpack? Art Historians Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker’s Smarthistory may provide some relief. Smarthistory is a free, open, not-for-profit online art history textbook that utilizes multimedia (video, maps, Flickr photos, vi.sualize.us, links and more) to present what they call and “unscripted conversations between art historians about the history of art.” Their use of multimedia and clever text to engage their audience may explain why smarthistory.org is becoming increasingly popular among art history students.

MoMA’s AB EX NY iPad app

MoMA has just developed a new app in conjunction with their current exhibition Abstract Expressionist New York. The free app for iPads offers a selection of high-resolution images from the exhibition plus information, videos and maps on the artists, New York City history, galleries, bars and other interesting bits of NY Ab Ex history. If Abstract Expressionism isn’t your thing, MoMA has a few other apps worth exploring.

Fair Use primer

Can’t grasp the concepts of Fair Use or the Public Domain? You are not alone.  Every year, more and more students are creating multimedia projects for class assignments, and frequently using copyrighted materials without any awareness of possible consequences. According to Patrick J. McGrail, assistant professor of communication at Jackson State University, we are in a “low-level crisis in copyright education now” (source: “Professors Publish Guide to Copyright Issues of Multimedia Projects”, Chronicle of Higher Education). Fortunately Eric Faden, a professor at Bucknell University, has created a video –  A Fair(y) Use Tale — to help clarify these confusing copyright principles.