a subject in transition; opportunities and problems
CHArt Seventeenth Annual Conference
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DIGITAL
ART HISTORY a subject in transition; opportunities and problems |
Susan Augustine, University of Illinois, USA
Visualizing Paris in the Past; a teaching aid
The central decades of the Nineteenth Century brought great changes to Paris. Literature about the period thoroughly documents the changes, but students may not always comprehend the enormous visual impact of them. To this end the University of Illinois at Chicago Digital Library has mounted a project that allows students to see the scope of the changes wrought by Baron Hausmann, Prosper Merimée and other planners and architects of Nineteenth Century France. An original map of Paris from 1860 forms the basis of the project. Digital photographs of it were manipulated in ways that allow a user to virtually wander the streets of Paris online. At this time images of approximately 20 buildings from the period link to their locations on the map, allowing the viewer to click on each historical site and view prints or photographs of them.
The microfiche version of the Courtauld Institute's Conway Library, one of the great architectural photo collections of the world, provides the images for the project. The project managers photocopied individual frames of the microfiche, scanned them and processed the resultant TIFF files with Adobe Photoshopä to produce clean, clear and compressed images. Metadata records for the images that employ appropriate controlled vocabulary for subject headings describe the content of the images. Links to more descriptive information, when they exist, may also be found in the metadata. The final product can be used as a teaching tool, allowing students not only to see images of 19th-century architecture, but view the buildings in their urban context.
The paper discusses the software, hardware, access issues inherent in such an undertaking. It also demonstrates the power of metadata as a finding aid for images in a way that allows the user to enter the vernacular as well as variant and alternate names for buildings. 10:20 Michael Greenhalgh, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. The Classroom of the Future The Classroom of the Future will review the use of digital media and the web in learning Art History today, and discuss the various technologies which add more "context" to artworks than is possible with "flat" slides. Beginning with the mechanics of teaching using exclusively web-based materials for storage and display, the paper continues with an assessment of panoramas (linked, hotspotted, or stand-alone), stereo, and VRML and related technologies, linked to image databases. The paper concludes with a question: will the classroom survive, or will it be a computer (or some other display technology) fed by the web?