Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture:

seeks to enrich the intellectual potential of our fields to inform understandings of an expanding array of visual practices as they are reshaped within digital culture, while also creating scholarly contexts for the use of digital media in film, media and visual studies.  By working with humanities centers, scholarly societies, and key library, archive, and university press partners, we are investigating and developing sustainable platforms for publishing interactive and rich media scholarship.

The Alliance has strategic partnerships with four archives (the Shoah Foundation, Critical Commons, the Hemispheric Institute’s Digital Video Library, and the Internet Archive) and three university presses (MIT, California and Duke). These  partners are providing the initial testing ground for the investigation of new publishing templates. Through working with the partners and disseminating the research and experimental methods and tools, the Alliance is working to better connect and integrate curated digital archives and scholarly publication by better enabling scholars to work with archival materials and to enable new forms of scholarship and new ways of doing scholarly work. “By creating an alliance between scholars, presses and archives, we will identify broad types of emerging scholarly communication and produce working demonstration projects with each partner press to illustrate these types.”

MIT Press has now published one of the Alliance projects, Learning from YouTube, which is available online. Read more about it on the Alliance blog, which is here.

The Harvard Law School Library just announced a new digital collection highlighting crime broadsides. The collection is online here and the collection description is: “Just as programs are sold at sporting events today, broadsides–styled at the time as “Last Dying Speeches” or “Bloody Murders”–were sold to the audience that gathered to witness public executions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.” The broadsides span 1707 to 1891 and include accounts of executions for various common and uncommon crimes. Now, researchers can see both the cultural reception of sentences as well as the court documents from London’s central criminal court, the Old Bailey (the proceedings of which are now online). Having these materials online is a boon to researchers for seeing the culture at the time in terms of law, news, and media. The entire broadside, zine-esque form is also interesting in light of blogs and online newszines.

The Comics Digital Collection is slowly building, and the scans of the Imagerie d’Epinal broadsheets will soon be online. While they’re still processing, they’re also online within Picasa so that others can see them even if only the smaller versions. It’s great to have rare materials added online so that others can use them and it’s even better knowing that these are only some of the many materials being added.

These pictorial broadsheets known as the Imagerie d’Epinal sheets told simple tales and were made by the Imagerie Pellerin of France, and then reprinted by the Humoristic Publishing Co. in Kansas, Missouri. These are the reprints and are important for the history of comics and printing. In Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, David Kunzle compares Töpffer’s “kind of graphic naïvete and that of the truly unschooled and awkward Imagerie d’Epinal” (77). Kunzle argues “the subsequent history of the comic strip occupies this middle groudm but inclining more to Töpffer than imagerie populaire” (77). Kunzle’s overall analysis places Töpffer alongside the likes of Gustave Doré, William Hogarth, Willhelm Busch, and George Cruikshank in publications like Punch, Le Charivari, L’Illustration, and Illustrated London News.

References: Kunzle, David. Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. Jackson, MS: UP of MS, 2007.

I’m obviously behind in my fan-reading of all things Google because I just noticed that they have Walter Crane’s Line and Form online (and I was planning to scan it next week when I noticed I couldn’t find it online to view or purchase easily). They don’t seem to have the cover of it, either that or they’re choosing not to show it in their cover browse view. At any rate, it’s wonderful that they have this online solving the issue of access to this important work for art, design, book history, and so many other fields.

In working on some of the comics materials here and setting up the Alice exhibit, I was looking at other online exhibits and kept stumbling across online comics exhibits. Each of these are different in terms of material covered and scope, but together these are absolutely fantastic for comics research.

The exhibits I’ve found so far (in random order) are:

• The Yale Library exhibit collection on comics, with the collection group titled the Illustrated Word
• Library of Congress’ exhibit on Blondie and UF’s exhibit on Blondie
• UF Exhibit on Superhero Comics
• Early Comic Strips at Duke
• Several from San Diego State University including work by Donna Barr and women cartoonists
• The University of Buffalo’s comics cover browser
• 9/11 Comics from the Library of Congress
• Japanese Woodblock prints at the University of California, San Francisco
• And, the Cartoon Art Museum lists many others

I found all of these looking for ideas for the Alice exhibit, but now I’m still looking because I’d like to do a comics exhibit once I have enough materials digitized. I was able to get the Superman Fanzine digitized, so that’s a great start and other materials are slowly being added to the comics collection as well.

The Afterlife of Alice in Wonderland Exhibit is now open. The exhibit website has some of the text and images, and it’s here. The exhibit also has a video on Youtube and a huge slideshow with images from the exhibit materials.

I’ve started working on digitizing photographs of comics creators. Don Ault, a professor at UF and a major comics scholar, is also a friend and he’s loaned me some of his materials. What’s really interesting about these photos is that they aren’t available elsewhere. Don has devoted a great deal of his life to the study of comics and so he’s amassed tons of photographs that span academic interests, comics collector-fan interests, and his personal academic-family chronology. For instance, a number of the photographs have Don in them and/or members of his family and members of the comics creators families. These personal, non-commercial photos are interesting for what they show of the people in them as well as for what they show about the history of comics and academia. I hope to have more of these online soon, and there are many, many to load.

Right now and for the next few days, the links to the larger versions of these images in UF’s Digital Collections won’t link properly. Until then, the images are in my Picasa.

UF’s Special Collections Library includes a popular culture collection with loads of comics. I’m currently working on a small grant to fund the digitization of some of these rich materials. In order to help support the grant, I made the collection page and digitized one sample issue of Will Eisner’s PS* Preventive Maintenance.

Hopefully I’ll be adding a great deal more in the near future, and I’ll hopefully be doing it with support for a much larger project later on. In the meantime, UF’s Libraries will be presenting at the Jewish Museum in Miami, Florida on October 21, and I’ll post details on it as they become available.

I remember hearing a whole lot about Picasa when it first came out, but most of the interest seemed to be from people using Picasa for personal photos or from photographers. Now that I’m working with it, I’m astounded with how useful it is for academics. The ability to have local and web albums that can be shared with everyone, and that generate slideshows, and that can do embedded slideshows on websites is really wonderful for what many academics do. I’ve always saved my images to my website and just worked with webpages in general, but many people feel like they’re not good at technology (when really, applications are just often mean to users) and so something simpler and more usable is an excellent option. It also means that I can easily share multiple images from UF’s Digital Collections (like images from The Wonderful Kittens displaying above) in a way that shows the academic and entertainment value of the images and the books-as-artifacts, as with the slides with this post.

Right now, I’m working on digitizing multiple versions of books about characters from the golden age of children’s literature, and this is one of the first Pinocchio books I’ve gotten online. I hope to have a number more soon. The variety of book forms and illustrations is extremely interesting, as each book offers a slightly different look at Pinocchio as a character.