Laurie N. Taylor May 18th, 2008
Comics studies and comics collections continue to grow, and now there’s more great news. Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library is acquiring the International Museum of Cartoon Art’s collection. Currently, OSU’s gallery space is small (or so this article says–I haven’t been lucky enough to see it yet, but it’s on my list of places to go as soon as I can) so OSU’s Cartoon Research Library is planning a larger gallery space to display more of their already excellent, and now growing, collection. This is great news for comics studies as a whole–it means more resources will be available in a centralized and organized place–and it means that the International Museum of Cartoon Art’s materials will again be available and in a place with lots of human, institutional, and printed friends. This is also great news for OSU and the International Museum of Cartoon Art because it will allow them to more easily continue their work in comic studies together.
Laurie N. Taylor May 7th, 2008
The Webby Award winners and nominees for 2008 are out and one of the nominees was “The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” from the National Palace Museum, and it’s on calligraphy. UF’s Digital Collections don’t have as much related material as we’d like (but we’re digitizing 100,000 pages a month so we’ll get there), but we do have the 24-volume set of “Qin ding xi Qing gu jian” and we made a few pages into a Flash flipbook to help display the beauty of the volumes.
Jane Pen has been instrumental in getting “Qin ding xi Qing gu jian” digitized and she’ll be visiting Taiwan this May 24-31, and meeting with the library at Tamkang University. Hopefully this will lead to more partnerships with libraries and museums, especially with so many museums in Taiwan are actively involved in digitization projects.
“The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” is an excellent site because it does something that couldn’t easily be done without the technologies it uses. For many of the other Webby Award sites this is also true, but many others are aesthetically pleasing first and then accessible second or not at all. For some sites like the National Palace Museum’s site tools to recognize calligraphy or handwriting akin to Optical Character Recognition simply aren’t yet available at the level they’re needed to make the site as accessible as possible, but the site still has a great deal of other accessible information. In the meantime, “The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” is a beautiful site and one that will hopefully be enriched even further in the near future with new technologies.
Laurie N. Taylor April 27th, 2008
Autotechnogeoglyphics
I’m not sure how I came across the “Pruned” blog’s post on autotechnogeoglyphics, but it’s the most wonderful word I’ve seen in sme time. auto-techno-geo-glyphics sounds of steampunk, science fiction, fantasy, epic world building and world altering technology, histories of giants, and it holds so much promise, so much potential for exploration. While the definition speaks more to reality, the word speaks to fantasy worlds of stone like Shadow of the Colossus, science-fiction worlds of steel, and ancient worlds of myth and reality, of stone, sediment, and things long lost.
“Pruned” explains autotechnogeoglyphics from the CLUI newsletter as:
Among the many wonderful things worth noting, there is their aerial photographs of automotive test tracks — those concrete hieroglyphs, in the fringes of urban sprawls, recording “the condition of America, land of the automobile, a syndrome that transformed the landscape of the nation, and the world, more than any other.”
As an information addict, I normally value words by utility. However, there are those words that go beyond the possible into the impossible, seeking for more than they can possibly find and finding all that they can in the process. autotechnogeoglyphics is one of those; it speaks to what it is and what it could be, helping to define studies of large-scale, made-designs in the Earth, made only over time with parts intentional and parts their sum unforeseeable in their planning, and all seen only with enough correct distance. It only seems right in all lowercase, perhaps because weighting the first letter seems to give priority to the auto over the rest, or perhaps the font isn’t right for a word of this magnitude. Hopefully autotechnogeoglyphics will appear enough to find its fit for font and scale, and hopefully it will also find and share new words that similarly sing.
Laurie N. Taylor March 27th, 2008
Meridian International center is hosting an exhibition, Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World, on Thursday, April 3, 2008. The exhibition will feature photographs and documents drawn from archives around the country. The brochure cover image, shown above, includes Dizzy Gillespie’s horn from a Cuban magazine, held at the University of Florida and scanned for especially for Jam Session. Unfortunately, the magazine is under copyright so we couldn’t put it online, but the Jam Session exhibit will be filled with many important items not online, but far too wonderful to miss. The exhibit:
chronicles the tours of American jazz legends as they traveled the globe on behalf of the U.S. State Department. From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and others served as cultural diplomats. They toured through over 35 foreign countries in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Middle East and North Africa, where they played their world-famous music and interacted with citizens—promoting a positive view of the United States at a time when Cold War tensions were at their height.
The exhibit even opens with a concert on April 3, at 6:30pm. See more about the exhibit and related events here. I wish I could make it, but if someone else does, please share comments and photos of the exhibit!
Laurie N. Taylor March 17th, 2008
The annual University of Florida Comics Conference will be this Friday and Saturday. The conference events will be held at Emerson Alumni Hall (on University Avenue, across from the stadium) and the program is on the conference website and posted below. The keynote speakers are the incredible Phoebe Gloeckner, Gail Simone, and Sally Cruikshank.
Friday, March 21st
- 9-10:15 AM – Panel 1: The “Body” of the Text
“‘Time is a Man / Space is a Woman’: Narrative + Visual Pleasure = Gender Confusion,” Aaron Kashtan
“Eggs, Birds and ‘an Hour for Lunch’: A Vision of the Grotesque Body in Clyde Fans: Book 1 by Seth,” John Kennett
“Love in the Binding,” Laurie Taylor
- 10:30-11:45 – Panel 2: Groensteen’s Networked Relations
“Memory and Sexuality: An Arthrological Study of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” Adrielle Mitchell
“The Joy of Plex: Erotic Arthrology, Tromplographic Intercourse, and ‘Interspecies Romances’ in Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg,” Daniel Yezbick
“Our Minds in the Gutters: Native American Women, Sexuality, and George O’Connor’s Graphic Novel Journey into Mohawk Country,” Melissa Mellon
- 11:45-1:15 – Lunch
- 1:15-2:30 – Panel 3: Women on Top
“Buxom Moebius Strip: The Hyperreal World of Gilbert Hernandez’s Fantastic Women,” Sacha Krader and Austin Rich
“‘Are You Ready?’: Renee Montoya and the Question of Lesbian Identity,” Karen Burrows
“Just One Damned Dildo After Another: Pornographic Space in the Work of Colleen Coover and Molly Kiely,” Lyndsay Brown
- 2:45-4:00 – Panel 4: Performance and Positions
“The Queering of Haruhi Fujioka: Cross-Dressing, Camp and Commoner Culture in Ouran High School Host Club,” Tania Darlington
“She-Rambos in Lipstick: Authorial and Artistic Depictions of Androgyny and Femininity in Comics,” Hannah Dame
“Reading between the (Panty) Lines: The Body as Ethnographic Text in Jaime Hernandez’s Recent Narratives,” Derek Royal
- 4-6 PM – Dinner
- 6-7:30 – Phoebe Gloeckner Keynote
- 7:30-9:30 – Reception Ustler Hall
Saturday, March 22nd
- 9-10:15 – Panel 5: The Figure on the Page
“‘Gimme Gimme This, Gimme Gimme That’: Confused Sexualities and Genres in Cooper and Myerson’s Horror Hospital Unplugged,” James Newlin
“How to Draw the (DC and) Marvel Way: How Changes in Representation of Female Bodies and Attitudes are Changing ‘Superheroine Chic,’” Mollie Dezern
“‘The Muse or the Viper: Excessive Depictions of the Female in Les Bas-Bleus and Cerebus,’” Tof Eklund
- 10:30-11:45 – Panel 7: Let’s Transgress
“I for Integrity: Futurity, (Inter)Subjectivities, and Sidekicks in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,” Jordana Greenblatt
“The Joker Wears Purple: Gender Transgressive Villains and Trickster Archetypes in Superhero Comics,” Rachel Edidin
“Otherness, Perversion and the Transformed Male Body in Seinen and Shounen Manga,” Katherine Schaeffer
- 11:45-1:15 – Lunch
- 1:30-3:00 – Sally Cruikshank Keynote
- 3:30-4:45 – Library Exhibit of UF: National Obsessions: Twentieth Century Pop Culture, Comics and Cross-Promotional Merchandizing. Featuring comics, movies/TV, and pop culture items from Star Wars, Peanuts, Walt Disney, and Superman and Batman
- 5-6:30 – Gail Simone Keynote
Laurie N. Taylor February 3rd, 2008
“This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reuseable, an object of value.”
The quote above is from page 38 of “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading,” by Ursula K. Le Guin in Harper’s Magazine (Vol. 316, No. 1983, February 2008, p. 33-38), and it speaks to the issue of materiality for digitization. Digital initiatives have rightfully focused on access to book contents, or access to information. Given the technological limitations for even this, with the difficulties from copyright and costs of mass digitization, access to information has been a lofty goal alone. Now however, with ever-increasing screen sizes and touch screens entering popular use through the MacAir, iPhone, Nintendo DS, and others, the object-ness of the book must be further considered.
In Evocative Objects, Sherry Turkle explains “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with” (5) and this love includes the object of the book. The design of an interface impacts its usability based on the way the user feels about the interface. Donald Norman has shown that people find “prettier” interfaces easier to use, so the interface is also a consideration in working through to a means for representing the book-as-object in a digital form. I don’t have any easy answers for how to best go about this representation, but I’m working on it for my upcoming presentation at the University of Florida’s Comics Conference, and I hope to post more about it soon. In the meantime, I’m considering the object qualities of digitized comics, the interface(s) in which they are represented, and the relation of digital libraries and museums in terms of needs and problems for showing the qualities of objects and addressing the users’ desires for those object-qualities.
Laurie N. Taylor December 20th, 2007
The Digital Library has been experimenting with pop-up and movable books, in part to abstract methods for working with movables into optimum ways for representing books as textual objects. One of the projects that came of the work with pop-ups is this version of a Cinderella Panoramic Book.
We’re also looking at a Flash page flipper for some of the scrapbooks and other flip-like books. We’ll be working to create files and then reconstruct the Flash page-flipping in Open Laszlo (so we can migrate it forward in DHTML and in Flash as the versions change).
Laurie N. Taylor December 3rd, 2007
One of the more interesting new Web 2.0-style mashups are library and museum partnerships. Both have large collections that need to be interconnected and digitized for easier and expanded access. However, libraries have traditionally focused on information access and museums on exhibit-access with the display significant to the materials. As more special collections go online and more information in general, display and access are both becoming more important for libraries and museums. The image above is a shot from a SketchUp file of Gallery B in the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. This is just one small work-in-progress, but it’s an artifact of a much larger process and it’s also really neat to explore the inside of a museum from outside the museum.
We also have these files for a virtual exhibit using the Special Collections Exhibit Area for an exhibit on the Art of Letterpress. Hopefully we’ll soon be adding more contextual materials on exhibits and exhibit design, as well as more exhibits themselves.
Laurie N. Taylor November 1st, 2007
While the map linked from this slideshow isn’t actually accurate because nearly all of the images are from the University of Florida’s original Library, Smathers East, and I spread them out for easier viewing, the map does accurately show why there’s reason to be excited because Picasa has improved once again. Not only can the images in Picasa be mapped, the images now show as small icons of the images instead of the generic picture icon, and the individual images can be clicked on and enlarged and they can be played in a slide-show format across the map.
The slideshow with the map is a great way to embed complicated information (this picture taken here, before this picture which was here, and after these pictures which were taken in this sequence in these places) and makes it allow easily visible. Plus, this is all available online without requiring any additional software so it’s even easier for users. This sort of elegant design is exactly what more programs need and it’s exactly what the Digital Library Center needs for many of our projects. We need ways that our users can easily access our materials in ways that contextualize the materials. While we still need more functionality because we need the same material-mapping onto a real map and we need it added to a chronological mapping system so we can locate materials in space and time, and over time (years, time periods, timeline-event markers). Other downloadable applications like Google Earth offer us more functionality and almost as much ease for our users, and each step toward more data integration and ease takes us closer to our current goal of modeling systems for a historical virtual world that users can see through time and space.
Laurie N. Taylor October 22nd, 2007
UF’s Digital Library Center has digitized this Grebo Mask. I’m not a mask expert of any sort, but the description tells that the Grebo Mask is possibly Kru (Liberia and Ivory Coast), in the shape of a bird with four eyes, representing a seer (Wood) circa 1960.
The Grebo Mask alone is a beautiful artifact, but what’s more interesting is that the Digital Library Center is working on a standard method for putting these images together in a looping clip, where users can click to stop the clip or to zoom in on the object. A number of museum websites offer spinning objects or objects that can be zoomed in on, but I haven’t found any examples as good as our full 360-rotation and depth of zooming. As museums and libraries move to digitize more materials, the best methods not only make materials accessible in the same ways as they would have been in non-digital format, but in ways that improve their usability through digitization.
Masks and other object-artifacts are often presented in museums encased in glass, so that only parts of the objects are viewable and the detail of the view is hindered by lighting, glass or ropes defining the space, and eyesight. Digitizing objects in ways that respect the materiality of objects allows users to see and study the objects in new ways while working within the traditional constraints of not handling, and thus not damaging the objects.
Digitization approaches that respect the materiality of object dovetails into digital preservation initiatives and into more recent studies on the importance of objects-as-objects, like Sherry Turkle’s edited collection Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, which studies the importance of objects for inspiration and thought patterns (it’s much like Donald Norman’s work on how designs affect the way users think about and use objects in Things that Make Us Smart and The Design of Everyday Things). I’m excited to see where this project takes us and to see the many problems and solutions we find in presenting digital versions of objects.