Calling all compulsive taggers

© Bruce Gilden / Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos is looking for a few good taggers — 50 taggers to be exact — to participate in some crowd-source photo tagging.  Hoping to make its archives more accessible, and take advantage of the fact that many of us spend too much time in front of our computers, Magnum Photos is initiating a collaborative annotation project and is looking for volunteer taggers who love photography and want to help shape its site into an online community.  At present, Magnum has 500,000 images online but only 200,000 have information attached to them.  If you’re interested in participating, you can sign up now to become a Magnum tagger. (source: James Estrin, “Crowd-Sourcing the Magnum Archive,” Lens, July 26, 2011)

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.

Google Goggles app

Google has created an app called Google Goggles that lets you use pictures taken with your mobile phone to search the web. It is designed to enable searching for things that aren’t easy to describe in words. Typing or speaking your query is not necessary – open the app, snap a picture, and wait for your search results. Google Goggles works well with certain types of images (books, landmarks, logos, artwork, text) and not so well with others (animals, plants, furniture for example). This free app is currently available for Android devices running Android 1.2 or higher and iPhone 3GS and iPhone4 devices.

The Getty Museum is encouraging its visitors to use Google Goggles and has created a special app for their collection. To read more about the Getty’s use of Google Goggles, go here.

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.

Take a tour of the original Barnes Foundation

The amazing collection of Impressionist and early modernist painting and sculpture making up the Barnes Foundation will be leaving its original home in Merion, PA and moving to its new home in Philadelphia next May.  After a long fought battle, the foundation managed to over-ride its original charter and bylaws established by the pharmaceutical tycoon Albert C. Barnes in the early 1920s which stated that none of the collection’s paintings or sculptures could be sold, lent or moved from the original gallery walls. To many, the quirky and idiosyncratic way in which Barnes displayed his collection — “antiquated-looking salon style that filled entire walls of its neo-Classical home with odd arrangements of paintings, organized to echo and rhyme their formal qualities and interspersed with decorative metalwork like ax heads and hinges” [New York Times] — made the Barnes Foundation such a fabulous and unusual institution. Happily for those of us who have never had the opportunity to visit the original galleries, the New York Times has produced a virtual tour of its many highlights. To read more about the tour and the Barnes Foundation, click here for the full article.

You can read more about the new building designed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien here.

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.

ARTstor tips & tools videos

This summer ARTstor is introducing video tutorials to help users explore newly released tools or navigate established features. Currently available: “Export to PowerPoint,” “Folders and image groups,” and “How to unlock a password protected folder.” Coming soon: “Faceted Search” and step-by-step PDF guides. You can find these new videos on YouTube and ARTstor’s Help Wiki. Also available: the ARTstor blog

Take a QTVR tour of the Sistine Chapel

The Vatican, with the technical assistance of Villanova University, has produced of a really impressive quick time video of the Sistine Chapel. The virtual tour allows you to navigate around the entire chapel and zoom in and out for a close reading of the wall paintings and decoration. The QTVR was made several years ago but we were just recently reminded of the video by an Art History TA who put it to great use in her AHI 25 section.  Please let us know about other QTVRs, web sites, image resources etc. that impress you — we would love to pass these on to other faculty and students.

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.