CRDDS joins DARIAH as a cooperating partner | University Libraries | University of Colorado Boulder

“CU Boulder researchers now have access to an international organization that supports the digital humanities through funding opportunities, access to high-quality learning materials, an open marketplace with tools and resources and more.

The organization is the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) and CU Boulder’s Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship (CRDDS) has joined as a cooperating partner. CRDDS is a collaboration between Research Computing and University Libraries, offering a full range of data services and support to the university and community….”

The Beaverbrook Art Gallery launches its online digital collection of nearly 5000 works of art

“The entire Beaverbrook Art Gallery permanent collection of works is now viewable online on the gallery’s website for members of the public to study and enjoy, and this is joined with new animated videos and activities for children.

Beginning as a COVID-19 project, the curatorial team at the Beaverbrook undertook the major project of reviewing, documenting, and photographing the entire collection housed at the gallery. Ranging from paintings, to sketches, prints, photographs and sculpture, the entire art collection has been re-catalogued and photographed with a state-of-the-art digital process. The photographs, along with artwork and artist information, have now been uploaded to a browsable database that is available to the public.”

Dispute over who runs an Elsevier journal

“Board members at an Elsevier journal are threatening to walk out over the publisher’s push to dramatically increase acceptances and its replacement of the editor in chief.

Peter Lloyd, professor of design methodology at the Delft University of Technology, was told in an email sent last month that his term as editor in chief of Design Studies was ending.

The change came without warning, although the executive publisher assigned to the journal said in a February message that the journal’s slow editorial and financial growth was “a recipe for closure.” …

It gets about 600 submissions a year, typically publishing around 35, a similar number to journals in the field of comparable quality.

But in the February email, executive publisher Lily Khidr set a target of publishing 250 papers in 2023. At the time, Lloyd pushed back on the target as “unrealistic” and said he wanted to grow acceptances to a more modest 50 a year….

“This focus on the quantity of published articles rather than their quality appears to be purely motivated by a desire for large profits,” he [Linden Ball] said….

The pushback follows mass resignations in April at the Elsevier journal NeuroImage, which was triggered by the publisher’s decision to raise article processing fees from $3,000 to $3,450. More than 40 editors announced in an open letter that they would leave and work with MIT Press to establish new nonprofit journal.

Lloyd told Times Higher Education that if Elsevier did not reverse its decision he would likely try to set up an alternative journal. “The shocking thing is the lack of consultation, the disrespect, the assumption that it’s just about numbers of papers,” he said….”

Design Research Society | The Future of Design Studies Journal

“The Executive Board of the DRS condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the recent treatment by Elsevier of the Editor-in-Chief and other Editors of Design Studies, the academic journal of the Design Research Society….

At the end of last year, Elsevier appointed a new publishing executive, Dr Lily Khidr, to manage the journal alongside the Editor-in-Chief. For many years this relationship between Editor-in-Chief and Publisher has been quite amicable. In February this year, Professor Lloyd received an email from Dr Khidr stating that: “the journal is not growing, financially or editorially and that is usually a recipe for closure.” In common with other leading journals in the design research discipline, Design Studies publishes around 35 papers per year. In the same email, Dr Khidr stated that: “the goal is 250 papers published in 2023″. This is a sevenfold increase in the number of publications and would represent an acceptance rate of 40% and subsequently a huge drop in quality. Whilst Professor Lloyd had long been in discussion with Elsevier about growing the journal, in his, and the other Editor’s, opinion this was simply not feasible or desirable. These concerns were voiced in a meeting between the Editorial team and Dr Khidr at the beginning of May….

The positions of all the current Editorial team are now quite uncertain, given the way the publisher is proceeding. It seems unlikely that their appointments will be continued beyond the end of this year, even if they do not resign before then. They are of course outraged, angered and distressed at what has happened….

The current Editors and Editorial Board of Design Studies and the Executive Board of the Design Research Society are currently assessing how they can respond to Elsevier’s action. Many of the Associate Editors (who with the Editor-in-Chief handle the reviewing processes) and the Editorial Board (who carry out a lot of the reviewing, along with many dozens of other volunteers annually) are likely to resign….”

 

Michelangelo’s David and cultural heritage images. The Italian pseudo-intellectual property and the end of public domain – Kluwer Copyright Blog

“On 20 April 2023, the Italian Civil Court of first instance of Florence (Tribunale civile di Firenze) issued a decision that held unlawful the reproduction by lenticular technique of the image of Michelangelo’s David and its juxtaposition with the image of a male model on the cover of GQ magazine. The reproduction was not authorized by the public museum Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence where the masterpiece is kept….

These recent controversies over the commercial use of images of Michelangelo’s David and Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man emerge from the Italian courts’ decisions while – paradoxically – the reproduction of the image of Botticelli’s Venus for the Italian Ministry of Tourism’s “Open to meraviglia” advertising campaign triggered a controversy about the role of the (Italian) State as custodian of (humanity’s) cultural heritage. In other words, the use of a modified version of The Birth of Venus by Botticelli in the advertising campaign demonstrates that the Italian State, on the one hand purports to decide when the use of cultural heritage is compatible with the “cultural heritage’s scope”, while on the other hand finds it natural to use a controversial modification of a masterpiece like The Birth of Venus to promote tourism….

At the same time, the Italian Ministry of Culture has published new “Guidelines for the determination of the minimum amounts of fees and charges for the concession of use of property handed over to state institutes and places of culture of the Ministry of Culture (Ministerial Decree of April 11, 2023, No. 161)”. These new Guidelines have also triggered a heated debate: some learned societies and scientific associations have raised concerns about the application of the Guidelines to academic publishing. For example, according to the Guidelines, a university press has to pay the Public Sector (Ministry of Culture or public museum) for the reproduction, in a book, of images of public cultural property. As in the Tribunale di Venezia and Tribunale di Firenze’s decisions, the idea is to transform the State into a commercial actor competing with other companies in the market of the commercial reproduction of cultural heritage images….

This conceptual confusion hides the real interest at stake: the creation of a new form of pseudo-intellectual property (in this case, a pseudo-copyright) that would attribute to the Italian State the power to exclusively control the commercial use of cultural heritage images….”

Job Opportunity: DARIAH seeks an Open Science Officer | DARIAH

“We are looking for an independently minded and highly motivated Open Science Officer to join DARIAH’s international team and contribute to the design and implementation of policy statements, guidelines and services related to the open dissemination of research outputs in the Arts and Humanities. 

This is a full-time position, preferably located at the DARIAH Coordination Office in Berlin, although remote applications from highly qualified candidates will also be considered….”

Yale University Art Gallery digitizes its publications – Yale Daily News

“A digitization effort of more than 50 years of the Yale University Art Gallery’s scholarly publications is gradually nearing completion.

The Online Access project was conceived during the start of the pandemic in an effort to increase the accessibility of the art gallery’s publications even while its doors were closed. This has involved two years of electronically uploading each of the gallery’s prior exhibit catalogs and accompanying them with alt text to ensure an immersive experience for all its potential users….”

Watson | Impact of an Institutional Repository on Viewers’ Experiences of a Student Art Exhibition | Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication

Abstract:  Introduction: Since 2014, Boise State University’s institutional repository (IR) has included artwork from Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) exhibitions. This paper explores how the experience of viewing artwork at an in-person BFA exhibition differs from that of viewing an online representation of it, makes recommendations to increase viewer engagement with online representations of artwork, and suggests ways that online exhibitions can enhance in-person viewing. Method: The authors conducted two surveys, one of in-person exhibition attendees and one of online exhibition viewers. Fixed-answer results were analyzed quantitatively, whereas an inductive qualitative coding process was used to analyze survey comments. Results: In-person participants were more likely to view all the artwork, spend more time at the exhibition, and view individual artwork for longer. Online participants were more likely to view artists’ statements. Online survey participants who attended the in-person exhibition preferred the in-person exhibition. Discussion: Results point toward a need to increase online viewers’ engagement with exhibition artwork, many of them centered around improving the usability of the IR interface. Finally, several benefits of the online environment are noted. Conclusion: Although the online representation of the art exhibition in the IR is not a complete replacement for the in-person exhibition, it is a representation that the authors believe can positively influence a viewer’s experience of the BFA exhibition, whether they have viewed the in-person exhibition or not. Respondents’ comments in both surveys provided suggestions for improving the two exhibitions, as well as insights into how IR exhibitions enhance the in-person exhibition experience.

 

Surprise machines | John Benjamins

“Although “the humanities so far has focused on literary texts, historical text records, and spatial data,” as stated by Lev Manovich in Cultural Analytics (Manovich, 2020, p.?10), the recent advancements in artificial intelligence are driving more attention to other media. For example, disciplines such as digital humanities now embrace more diverse types of corpora (Champion, 2016). Yet this shift of attention is also visible in museums, which recently took a step forward by establishing the field of experimental museology (Kenderdine et al., 2021).

This article illustrates the visualization of an extensive image collection through digital means. Following a growing interest in the digital mapping of images – proved by the various scientific articles published on the subject (Bludau et al., 2021; Crockett, 2019; Seguin, 2018), Ph.D. theses (Kräutli, 2016; Vane, 2019), software (American Museum of Natural History, 2020/2022; Diagne et al., 2018; Pietsch, 2018/2022), and presentations (Benedetti, 2022; Klinke, 2021) – this text describes an interdisciplinary experiment at the intersection of information design, experimental museology, and cultural analytics.

Surprise Machines is a data visualization that maps more than 200,000 digital images of the Harvard Art Museums (HAM) and a digital installation for museum visitors to understand the collection’s vastness. Part of a temporary exhibition organized by metaLAB (at) Harvard and entitled Curatorial A(i)gents, Surprise Machines is enriched by a choreographic interface that allows visitors to interact with the visualization through a camera capturing body gestures. The project is unique for its interdisciplinarity, looking at the prestigious collection of Harvard University through cutting-edge techniques of AI….”

Public Art Archive

“The Public Art Archive (PAA) is a free, continually growing, online and mobile database of completed public artworks throughout the U.S. and abroad. By uniting records from public art organizations and artists into one comprehensive resource, PAA aims to provide universal access to the complex stories that characterize public artworks not as static objects, but as dynamic, interconnected keepers of history, context and meaning. PAA’s mission “to make public art more public” has guided the program’s continued growth into one of the largest active databases of public art….”

Public Art Archive Launches New Website to Make Public Art Available for All

“The Public Art Archive™ (PAA) announces the launch of an expansive new website designed by digital agency Bilberrry. A project of the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), a US Regional Arts Organization, the PAA is a singular platform for connecting with public art in any community. The site, publicartarchive.org, includes a public art documentation database with interactive maps, bringing thousands of public artworks to visitors across the country and beyond. The newly redesigned website increases accessibility and user-friendliness within the resource built to discover the history, context, and meaning behind each work.

As general interest in public art has expanded, the site’s user experience needed to evolve from a platform designed as a visual library database —where users often know what they’re looking for prior to visiting the site — to a site that feels welcoming to the general public. The new platform is entirely device-responsive, allowing users to explore collections from desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. Through intuitive search filters, grid-view map results, and premium exhibition spotlights, users can now navigate the site with an optimized visual experience. Artwork record pages have also been revamped to enhance the way media, video, audio, and PDFs are displayed, including exclusive access to artworks not on view….”

Access to the Index of Medieval Art Database Will Become Free on July 1, 2023

“We are very pleased to announce that as of July 1, 2023, a paid subscription will no longer be required for access to the Index of Medieval Art database. This transition was made possible by a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the support of the Index’s parent department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University….”