Teaching with Images — Tools and Resources
October 25th, 2008
1) ARTstor Your institution must subscribe.
ARTstor is a digital library of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes. The ARTstor Digital Library is used by educators, scholars, and students at a variety of institutions including universities, colleges, museums, public libraries, and K-12 schools. As of January 2008, approximately 95% of ARTstor’s collections are available for download at 1024 pixels on the long side, while the remaining 5% may be downloaded at 400 pixels on the long side.
In addition, as part of the Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) initiative, select images within ARTstor may be downloaded free-of-charge at very high resolutions for noncommercial use in scholarly publications.
2) NYPL Digital Gallery
NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 600,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
3) Wikimedia
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to all. Unlike traditional media repositories, Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as the source and the authors are credited and as long as users release their copies/improvements under the same freedom to others.
4) Flickr Commons
Search by tag.
The power of Flickr groups.
The power of the contextualized image.
IMAGE LIBRARY DATABASES WITH TEACHING TOOLS
1) Luna, Insight: A commercial solution
The Insight® Software Suite’s award winning features empower users to build, manage and share digital collections of any size. Unique to Insight is a rich toolset for working with images, text, audio and video files, PDFs, etc. Complete catalog data accompanies every image, allowing for quick and easy searches across one or many collections.
2) Almagest: Another open source solution — this one developed by Princeton.
3) MDID: An open source solution developed by James Madison University — the application we used for FITDIL (the FIT Digital Image Library)
1) JING
Jing works with Screencast – set up an account there to upload your videos and get links and embed codes.
Click here for Diane Arbus Video made with Jing
Here’s a Jing video embedded in a blog:
An example of an image captured and annotated with Jing:
2) SKITCH
Here’s an example of an image captured an annotated with Skitch:
3) Finetuna
Upload an image or grab a screenshot, annotate it, and email it. Also has a firefox plug-in.
4) Flickr annotations
Merode Altarpiece
Midterm Project
Image Collections
1) Flickr
Click here for an example of teaching with Flickr
Click here for another (more recent) example of teaching with Flickr
2) Voicethread
Click here to try it – click “Sign In or Register” (it’s very quick to set up an account)
Click here for an example of teacher-created content with Voicethread
Click here for another example — using Voicethread for teacher-created content
Click here for student-created content on Voicethread
3) Cozimo
With Cozimo you can collaborate and review images and videos — together in real-time or on your own time. Get feedback from clients and colleagues instantly. Cozimo is the faster, better, simpler way to work.
Cozimo also has a WordPress plugin — click here to see and try.
5) ProofHQ
ProofHQ is a smarter, easier way to manage review and approval of designs, artwork and documents. It is an online collaboration, proofing and approval tool built specifically for brands, agencies, designers, print and production.
6) Thinkature
With Thinkature, you can create a collaborative workspace and invite coworkers, friends, and colleagues to join you in just seconds. Once inside your workspace, you can communicate by chatting, drawing, creating cards, and adding content from around the Internet. It’s all synchronous, too – no need to hit reload or get an editing lock.
1) Tag Galaxy
2) Oskope
3) picitup
4) PicLens
5) Imagery
6) Cyclops
1) Dipity (Timeline Creator)
Smarthistory in Dipity
2) Fotki – (photo-storage)
An example
Another example
3) Mead Map (concept mapping)
Eastman House
National Gallery of Art
Beyond the Blog: Smarthistory Redesign Launched!
October 19th, 2008
About the Web-Book
As many of you undoubtedly already know, in addition to this blog, a couple of years ago we created a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook. The redesign, launched on October 15, was funded by a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. It allows users to browse more than one hundred audio and video conversations about works of art by time period, style, or artist, or by scrolling through an image browser created to look like an art history textbook. We were hard at work on it all summer!
A lot of effort went into the new design to maximize its clarity and value and we are extremely grateful to our fantastic international team for their dedication, foresight, and ultimately for their belief in this project. Lotte Meijer (Holland), our brilliant information architect (she specializes in museum education technologies) and Mickey Mayo (NY), our unbelievably insightful, creative web designer were both a pleasure to work with as were our wonderful developers Dragan Nikolic (Zurich) and Matt Haenlin (Boston). In short, the site is gorgeous because of Mickey, it works and makes sense because of Lotte, and it exists thanks to Dragan and Matt. On Dragan’s recommendation — and thanks to Lotte’s desire to make the site everything we envisioned and more, we used MODx instead of wordpress (both are open source) because of its greater flexibility. We had originally organized the contents of the Smarthistory site using WordPress (we still use it for this blog) — customized for us quite a bit by Joseph Ugoretz — who created it on the back end and keeps it going. But in the end, wordpress is really blogging software and proved imperfect for our expanding needs.
The new site can be found at www.smarthistory.org
About this Blog
Our objectives for the Smarthistory blog have changed over time. In 2005, this blog was all we had and so we posted everything here. However, as the amount of content grew, the blog became a place for us to post about relevant activities and especially about our thoughts and discoveries regarding image—based teaching and technology and art in Second Life. We hope you find it valuable and we encourage your comments—they help us to know whether we are on the right track.
Beth & Steven
smARThistory Update
August 14th, 2008
Part 1: the .Org/.Us Fiasco!
There has been a flurry of activity behind the scenes at smARThistory over the past few months and Beth Harris and I can finally bring you up-to-date. As many of you know, we created the domain smARThistory.org a little over three years ago and grew our blog and web-book content to the point where we were visited well over 100,000 times from over 100 countries. Little did we know that our modest success made our domain, smARThistory.org, a target of nefarious web domain pirates. When our domain registration lapsed for a few days last spring due to an email mix up, the .org site was bought at auction by a man in Armenia for a sizable amount of money, based, we later learned, on the traffic we had generated. We immediately requested return of the domain and investigated the rules set forth by ICANN and other agencies. But in the end, the auction was legitimate and the mistake was ours so we had little recourse.
To make matters worse, the new owner of the domain kept our content up on his site despite our repeated demands that he respect our work and copyrights. He also began to post unrelated commercial advertisements, something we have never done. We were able to get Google Adsense to remove their ads but the site links began to break almost immediately and we feared our viewers would assume we were responsible for this neglect. In response, we immediately opened smARThistory.us and hoped our viewers would somehow find us there. We also continued to negotiate for the return of the .org domain even as it changed hands again. As of this week, we have it (and now have it locked in for the next ten years) and we are both breathing easier. We hope to have smARThistory.org up and running again within a few weeks (.us will then be redirected to the .org site). We are only thankful that it is summer and hope that most of our readers are not in session and were not inconvenienced. For those who were, we offer our sincerest regrets and hope you will return. We think you will be very excited by what you find here this fall.
Update Part 2: A Samuel H. Kress Foundation Grant Means No Tan This Summer But A Great Website Redesign!
Thanks to the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, smARThistory was awarded a $25,000 grant. This has allowed us to work with Lotte Meijer, our brilliant information architect and Mickey Mayo, our unbelievably insightful and creative web designer (and their respective teams). Below are excepts from the proposal:
Background
smARThistory.us is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional and static art history textbook. We began smARThistory three years ago by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after, we embedded the audio files in our online survey courses. The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book. We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images.
We are interested in delivering the narratives of art history using the read-write web’s interactivity and capacity for authoring and remixing. Publishers are adding multimedia to their textbooks, but unfortunately they are doing so in proprietary, password-protected adjunct websites. These are weak because they maintain an old model of closed and protected content, eliminating Web 2.0 possibilities for the open collaboration and open communities that our students now use and expect.
In smARThistory, we have aimed for reliable content and a delivery model that is entertaining and occasionally even playful. Our podcasts and screen-casts are spontaneous conversations about works of art where we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy. We have found that the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more compelling to our students (and the public) than a monologue. When students listen to shifts of meaning as we seek to understand each other, we model the experience we want our students to have—a willingness to encounter the unfamiliar and transform it in ways that make it meaningful to them.
We believe that smARThistory is broadly applicable to our discipline and is a first step toward understanding how art history can fit into the new collaborative culture created by web 2.0 technologies. Following this project, we will begin a conversation with other art historians to discuss different models for our own discipline-specific collaboration.
Aim of Grant
We have delivered and organized the content of smARThistory using the free, open source application, WordPress. Out-of-the-box, it has been a very useful tool in the initial stages of our project. Because WordPress is open-source, the look, feel, and structure of the site is entirely customizable. Unfortunately, our expertise as art historians does not include the requisite programming skills. This grant will allow us to use the summer of 2008 to engage an accomplished web designer, an information architect who focuses on museum education, and a programmer to work with us in order to improve the site’s design and usability by:
1. Reorganization of the content along Art Historical pointers (Chronology, Style, Media etc)
2. Redesigning the information architecture of the entire site for consistency and ease of use
3. Visual Redesign of the entire site for better ‘at-a-glance’ navigation and access
a. Redesign the Homepage template to improve clarity and visual attractiveness
b. Added tagging/search functionality
c. Establish a modular structure to the site that can support future expansion
4. Creating a more rational back-end structure that will readily accommodate future content growth and added functionality.
In the fall and winter, when these objective have been met, we will publicize smARThistory in a coordinated roll-out to increase use and engage additional collaborators. We plan to attend the 2008-2009 annual conferences of the College Art Association in Los Angeles, the Visual Resource Association in Toronto, and Educause in Orlando where we intend to present papers on this project. Further, we will continue to work with ARTstor and the New Media Consortium to promote smARThistory among art historians and related organizations.
Update: As it turns out, on the recommendation of dragan, our Swiss developer, we are likely going to use MODx instead of wordpress for the web-book because of its greater flexibility.
Max Newbold and Sez Zabelin, Second Life correspondents for smARThistory, discuss Michelangelo’s Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, recreated by Steve Taylor (aka Stan Frangible), on the Vassar College Second Life campus.
Michelangelo, Last Judgment, 1534-41, Sistine Chapel, Vatican [17:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download