The French Revolution Digital Archive, a partnership between Stanford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, was announced this week with some 14,000 high-resolution images.
archives
Posted inNews
The Astounding Art and Artifacts Museums Didn’t Know They Had
Sometimes museums and archives don’t know the treasures they already have, collecting dust on some forlorn shelf or hidden away in a forgotten box. Through mislabeling or earlier disorganization, great works of art and history are sometimes lost for years before being “discovered” right inside the museum walls.
Posted inArt
Digitizing a Beloved Egyptian Scholar’s Archive
Ahmed Zaky Abushady was a polymath in the Victorian mold, a preeminent Egyptian literary figure, bee scientist, inventor, and physician who found pathways between modes of thought and scholarship long before “interdisciplinary” became an academic catchall.
Posted inNews
Vatican and Oxford Launch Ambitious Digital Archive of Ancient Texts
The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford and the Vatican Library have some of the richest collections of ancient biblical texts, but most of them are inaccessible to the general public. Now, through a collaborative project, 1.5 million manuscript pages are being digitized for public access online.
Posted inArt
The Man Who Tried to Photograph Thoughts
In the 1960s, a Denver-based psychiatrist and a man who believed he could take photographs with his thoughts staged a series of experiments with Polaroid instant film. Dr. Jule Eisenbud and his test subject, Ted Serios, a former bellhop, were trying to prove that a psychic projection could manifest on film.
Posted inArt
Courtauld Institute Attempts to Catalogue Every Work of Gothic Ivory Art
The last time anyone attempted to catalogue all known Gothic ivory sculpture was a three-volume publication from a French scholar in 1924, but now the Gothic Ivories Project at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art is taking a 21st century stab at it with an online database.
Posted inArt
Tune In, Drop Out: The Timothy Leary Papers Are Now Available to the Public
The newly open-the-public Timothy Leary papers at the New York Public Library is a fascinating trove.
Posted inArt
Photographing the State of the Environment in the 1970s
Back in the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency sent over 70 photographers to all 50 states in order to document the environmental concerns of the regions.
Posted inArt
Museum Galleries So Incredible, It’s Hard to Believe They’re Gone
There’s something about the cluttered aesthetic of the 19th century that is definitely missed even if, sure, context and history could play second chair to spectacle.
Posted inOpinion
Museum as Hub? Creating a Living Archive
LOS ANGELES — Archival work as an art form? Visit any prolific artist’s studio and you’ll see the intense need for archiving their work for a future age. This is particularly true, I think, for artists practicing outside the world’s major art centers, where extensive media and established institutions help create an informal archive, if simply through press coverage, writings, and photos.
Posted inArt
The Power of the Archive
Once acquainted with the work of the conceptualist, Dylan Stone, one becomes drawn into the world of his art-making. In different projects, he has revisited some of the same interests, including the cataloging and documentation of books, urban architecture, and streets. His work often considers the past, including his own biographical events as well as the happenings of more distant centuries. He seems equally interested in methods of taxonomy as in the libraries and museums that make that process their business.