A Visit To ARTstor
January 29th, 2008
I was lucky enough to be invited to ARTstor for the day recently. They invited a handful of faculty to talk to them about how they use ARTstor, to try out the new version of ARTstor, and to talk about ARTstor’s future. As always, it’s great to talk to the hard-working and dedicated folks there, fighting to make images accessible and easy for us to use in the classroom. How can we thank them enough for fighting our battles for us?
I am always surprised at how few people use ARTstor live, instead preferring the Offline Image Viewer, which seems somewhat dead to me. It’s a great tool, don’t get me wrong, but having ARTstor live feels so much better to me. The images seem so much less static. Maybe its getting rid of that dead black background, and instead having the background of the web browser. Also, I think there is a tendency not to use the zooming feature while in the OIV.
It would be so great if ARTstor could devote more resources to building social tools into the image library. What if we could see what other instructors are using for comparison images? Or links to other related content, or discussions about teaching strategies around different images? After all, if the goal is to make us better teachers, perhaps ARTstor can help us open up our classrooms so we can learn from each other. Right now, using using digital image libraries remain a very isolated experience, much more isolating in fact, than the slide library was. Steven Zucker and I have written about this in a forthcoming publication.
Anyway, thanks ARTstor… we’re all very grateful.
Matisse, The Red Studio (1911)
January 6th, 2008
Whew! Did this one by editing the audio in Garageband, then saving it in iTunes, converting it to an mp3, bringing that into Camtasia, and then using the zoom and pan feature which is a lot of fun.
Click below to watch the video of this painting at MoMA.
Looking for contributors!
January 5th, 2008
As many of you know, we have been working on creating a “sister” site to this blog—smARThistory.org/site. We hope to create a dynamic multimedia enhancement (or even substitute) for the static art history textbook. We think the big traditional textbooks, which try to create a one-size-fits-all solution but too often create a generalized narrative are simply too expensive and not very engaging. We are looking for art historians interested in contributing to the smARThistory site. We are less interested in original scholarship, than in effective teaching content which uses the more personal voice that we tend to use in the classroom. Collaborations are also welcome, as we have discovered that conversations are a remarkably effective way to teach students how to look at and analyze a work of art. If you are interested in contributing text and/or audio/video, please email beth_harris [at] gmail.com and drszucker [at] gmail.com with a brief C.V. and the topic to which you would like to contribute.
Beth Harris & Steven Zucker
Barnett Newman’s Onement I
January 5th, 2008
An enhanced podcast about Barnett Newman’s Onement, I, 1948 (MoMA).
