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….”

What Does It Mean to Be Truly Open Access?

Abstract:  In 2016, when my colleagues and I founded Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal, we spent several sessions making mind maps to generate and settle upon a name for the journal. “Refract” is where we landed, aptly reflecting our aim to break up and reallocate how we produce, present, and grapple with the dissemination of ideas. The element of the title that did not require extensive discussion was “open access.” We instinctively knew that we wanted the journal’s content, contributors, and readership to be as broad and inclusive as possible. Because of that, we prioritized publishing on a digital platform. Digital publishing is an inherent characteristic of open access. But what exactly is open access? How does it encourage innovative scholarship? How does it perpetuate or dissolve academic gatekeeping? 

UKRI Infrastructure Advisory Committee – UKRI

“UKRI is seeking up to 3 members from across UKRI’s stakeholder groups to join the Infrastructure Advisory Committee which provides advice and guidance on long term infrastructure investment priorities and prioritisation of investments.

We are seeking senior level expert members with a strong interest and experience in research and innovation infrastructure planning or delivery, deep expertise in their professional area, and an ability to think strategically beyond their discipline.

We would particularly welcome applications from individuals with a background in arts and social sciences, innovation, international infrastructure prioritisation, or those from groups currently under-represented at senior levels in the research and innovation community….”

Vienna’s Albertina Museum goes open access | Europeana Pro

“In summer 2022, Vienna’s Albertina Museum put thousands of its digitised images into the public domain, many of which are available through the Europeana website. Douglas McCarthy interviews Martina Pichler to learn about the new open access policy and its benefits….”

 

Guest Post — Exploring the Strengths and Limitations of Replication in the Humanities: Two Case Studies

“In the past few years, a variety of articles have examined why attempts to replicate studies in biomedical, natural and social sciences often are without success. These debates on the so-called ‘replication crisis’ led Rik Peels and Lex Bouter in 2018 to ask the question: What about replication in the humanities? Scholars in the humanities go about their research in other ways than those in the sciences, because of the difference in the sources, data and methods they work with, the type of questions they try to answer and the purposes they aim to serve. But two of the things that both domains have in common, is that they aspire to acquire knowledge that is not largely dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the researcher and that their future studies often relate to or build upon the findings of previous ones. Might replication studies be a useful way to corroborate findings in the humanities? If so, what would they look like in various fields within the humanities and how would they differ from replication in the biomedical, natural and social sciences? What aims would they strive for in terms of epistemic progress? What can the humanities learn from replication studies in the sciences and vice versa? In addition to this, we need to ask whether and how, as Peels and Bouter introduced, replication might contribute to the trustworthiness of research in the humanities. Furthermore, concerns regarding replication studies in the humanities voiced by other scholars, like Leonelli and Penders, Holbrook and De Rijcke, call for further investigation….”

Investigating Open Access Publishing Practices of Early and Mid?Career Researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences Disciplines – Ayeni – 2022 – Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library

Abstract:  Although open access (OA) to research outputs has been proven to improve research readership, citation, and impact, the uptake of OA in some disciplines has remained low. In this paper, we investigated and compared OA publishing practices of early career and mid-career researchers in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) disciplines in Canada. The descriptive survey design with the use of online questionnaire was employed. Participants were drawn from a group of 15 public research universities via their openly available emails on university websites. Survey data was analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistics. Findings show that in the last three years, 74.1% of mid-career researchers have published in OA journals, compared to 63.1% of early career researchers. However, OA publishing of monographs (21.3%) and conference proceedings (29.9%), as well as the frequency and extent OA publishing remains low among all participants. ANOVA results (F [2, 218] = 3.683, p = .027, ?2 = .033) showed that 3.3% of the variance in researchers’ OA publishing frequency can be attributed to their disciplines. Overall, OA publishing among researchers in the HASS disciplines is still low. Hence, there is a need to identify factors that facilitate or hinder HASS researchers’ OA publishing.

 

Factors influencing Canadian HASS researchers’ open access publishing practices: Implication for the future of scholarly communication | Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l’ACSI

Despite increasing awareness and support for open access (OA) publishing, and the advantages of doing so, there is still a low uptake of OA in some disciplines. We surveyed 228 early and mid-career researchers from 15 public universities in Canada. The Social Exchange Theory provided a theoretical foundation that informed factors investigated in this study. Correlation and regression analyses were used to test research hypotheses, while one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed to test level of effect sizes within subjects. Findings show that altruism (r =.352, ? = .331) influenced researchers’ OA publishing practices whereas visibility and prestige do not, even though they are positively correlated. Furthermore, ANOVA results showed that researchers’ career stages have significant effect on their OA publishing practices as mid-career researchers published more in OA outlets. Therefore, building structures and policies that spur researchers’ altruism towards publishing OA should be a continuous and future approach to achieving the ideals of OA in Canada.

Own Music! Own Books! – Popula

“It’s long past time for media ownership to be recognized as an essential right. The Internet Archive and all other digital libraries and archives must be protected, and people need to see this ludicrously unethical suit by big publishers for what it is: an assault on art and truth and its protection for posterity.”

Artvee

“In the last few years, several major museums and libraries have instituted an open access policy by designating most or all of the public domain art in their collections with a creative commons license making them available for use for any purpose with no restrictions attached.

We sort through and aggregate the best of these images in one location to make them easy to discover and download.

Some of our sources include….”