Do you remember the internet of ten years ago? You’d type in a web address and play a game of Minesweeper as you waited for the page to load. Images on the web were small and of poor quality for the most part, took forever to load, and overflowed your e-mail account if you weren’t careful.
We’ve come a long way in terms of technology, and there are some incredibly innovative and useful tools available online now! One beautiful example is a new site dedicated to Piero della Francesca’s The Legend of the True Cross. Created by an international team of specialists, the site allows you to view a 3-D model of the chapel (if you are using Internet Explorer), as well as very high-resolution images of the paintings that compose this work (in any browser). It contains scholarly information about The Legend of the True Cross, and is a great way to visualize how the work actually functions in the location.
Here are some sample images (click to make them bigger, and if you like these, make sure you visit the actual site!):
I love YouTube, the site where virtually anyone can post videos of virtually anything, as much as the next person, but I never thought I’d be using it for learning or for work. To me, it wasn’t much more than a place to watch really fun stuff people sent me in e-mail forwards, like this or this. Slowly but surely, I’ve been reconsidering my stance on YouTube. There’s actually a ton of useful material if you’re willing to dig a little bit to find it.
For example, a few months ago I found a portion of one of my all-time favorite works, The Way Things Go by Fischli and Weiss:
A few weeks ago, The Observer published a list of the “Top 50 Arts Videos on YouTube,” which covers art, literature, and music, and includes things like this interview with Francis Bacon:
YouTube just keeps proving itself more useful. Earlier in the quarter Sarah showed me some great clips of early 90s all-girl punk bands she was using for her class. Over the summer, I managed to find a video Dan mentioned, Claude Lelouch’s 1976 C’était un Rendezvous (admittedly of rather poor quality, but available nonetheless).
My visual resources colleagues at the Architecture school at UT-Austin have found yet another use for YouTube. They’ve produced several videos to market their services and offer users tips on things like creating PowerPoint presentations.
Videos from YouTube, Google Video, and other sites can be incorporated into your DUVAGA presentations by simply copying the “embed code” (shown below) from the video webpage into DUVAGA. As long as the video remains on YouTube or Google Video, it will remain in your gallery.
If you haven’t used ARTstor or Grove Art online yet this month, you’re in for a treat! Both sites have been pretty dramatically redesigned, and I think you’ll find both easier to use.
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ARTstor
If you’ve used ARTstor in the past, you might have been a little frustrated by the speed of the site, or the fact that it opened a new browser window by default. ARTstor has changed the software on which it is built, and seems to have improved quite a bit as a result. It’s now easier to perform searches, and much quicker to load search results. If you use their Offline Image Viewer (OIV), you get an extremely high resolution image. Most ARTstor images are also available for download, and subsequent inclusion in other presentation softwares (such as DUVAGA, where you can add ARTstor images as “personal” images), but if you go this route you will end up with an image too small to zoom in on (though it should be fine for standard, non-zooming projection). As a work-around, you are able to download details of images for use in other presentation software. As always, ARTstor is adding to their collections, which now number in the hundreds of thousands, and cover a lot of images that faculty outside the art field will likely find useful. You can access ARTstor through Penrose Library, and keep up with their latest announcements on their website.
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Grove Art Online is now housed under Oxford Art Online
A new site was launched earlier this month for Oxford Art Online, which encompasses Grove Art Online, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. While the new site is different from the old Grove Art Online, it seems like it will be easier to narrow your search to just one or a few of the sources covered, and to limit to types of results (i.e. biography or image). It remains an excellent reference tool for information on artists, movements, techniques, and themes, and now its information is better structured. Access Oxford Art Online through Penrose Library (note: this links you to the correct record and site, it just takes the library world a while to catch up with name changes like this).
If you have questions about or need help using either of these valuable resources, I’m happy to help!
Next time you conduct a search in DUVAGA, you’ll have a new option for viewing your search results. Alex has incorporated an application called PicLens into the DUVAGA system. If you download the software (there’s also a link on the DUVAGA website), here’s what you’ll be able to do:
1.) Perform any search in DUVAGA, and click “PicLens Slideshow” from the results page (click the image above to make it bigger).
2.) If PicLens has been installed correctly, you should see something like the image above. There’s a scroll tool at the bottom of the page that will allow you to move through all of the search results very quickly.
3.) By clicking on one of the images, you can view a larger version of it, with its information. And if you click on the icon I’ve pointed to above…
You’ll return to DUVAGA, where you can add the image to your gallery.
This is a great way to sort through a lot of visual information, and to search through a lot of images quickly. Once you have the software installed on your browser, there are a number of other sites (including Flickr and Google Image searches) that it works with, too. Some words of warning, though: The application is very pretty and may be addictive. Also, it won’t work on all computer systems (like my 4-year-old Toshiba at home), but most newer computers should support it. And it does not project in 118 or 119, I think because of the mirroring software we use in those rooms. If you want a live demonstration or help downloading PicLens, let me know!
