A project created under Harvard University’s digital humanities research and teaching unit, metaLAB, “Colour Lens” organizes digitized objects by color from the Rijksmuseum, Walters Art Museum, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and the Wolfsonian-FIU Museum. While the project doesn’t produce a groundbreaking theory on color usage in art, it provides a small pool of visual data on the types of colors common to historic periods, geographic areas, or types of object. For example, the prevalence of dark colors in Northern Renaissance paintings. Alternately, users can find data on the use of a specifc color across temporal and geographic boundaries. They can also see amount of color(s) present in a work in the graph beneath it.
The Rijksmuseum collection page
In the top toolbar one can select the Rijksmuseum, Walters, or Wolfsonian tabs to see the colors represented in their digitized collections or one can select 1 of 117 colors present in a bar graph at the top of the page to view all objects of a specific color. On the next page, users can select more colors or an institution to further filter their results. The bar graph at the top of the page displays the quantity of colors per group of objects, and scrolling upwards transforms the graph into a vertical color palate. Clicking on an object directs users to its page on the hosting institution’s website, which users can access and explore from there.
(L) Results for a shade of pink, (R) Color palate generated from the same shade
The “One Met. Many Worlds.” project under the Metropolitan Museum of Art and funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies has digitized more than 500 objects from the Met’s collection. Atypical of many digital collections, the project categorizes objects by descriptive adjectives, such as “balanced”, “patterned”, or “jagged”, and true to the “Many Worlds” part of its title, one can access it in 10 languages. I experimented using the website in the languages I am familiar with: English, Japanese, and French, and found that the content in all three languages were equal even if some translations of adjectives didn’t always agree.
Left to right: English (“patterned”), Japanese (“模様のある”), French (“á motif”)
I wish that the “One Met. Many Worlds.” project provided information about how the descriptive adjectives were decided per object. Did the project’s creators determine the terms? Did Met visitors or members? However, it is a visually appealing dataset of the Met’s highlights and it presents how people find meaning in art.
On the project’s homepage, users select their language in a toolbar and scroll down to a grid of images. Hovering over one displays an adjective related to the object. Clicking on it directs to a page with other objects that the adjective describes to help users discover even more objects, and from there they can go to an individual object’s page. The Title tab includes data about the object (dimensions, name, artist, etc.), the Art History tab gives a paragraph-long description of the object, and the Object tab includes clickable squares with the other adjectives applied to the object. The Visitor Gallery tab in the toolbar at the top of all pages includes user-created pairs of objects with conceptual connections (i.e. “Art and Artifact”, “Left and Right”). Objects, also in the toolbar, has a grid list of all of the objects.
Visitor Gallery
A Closer Look at the Mona Lisa
“A Closer Look at the Mona Lisa” project through the Louvre explores the details of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and its historical background through voiceovers, narrations, and zoom-able images. Created in 2005, users may have trouble seeing its small-screen format and miniscule text size on screens significantly bigger than those ten years ago. However, “A Closer Look at the Mona Lisa” was ahead of its time with zoom-in tools and fluid flash animations, and it fully functions on all internet browsers at the time that I wrote this resource review.
The zoom tool allows users to literally take a closer look at the Mona Lisa
An introductory video introduces users to the exhibition space of the Mona Lisa and directsto the main menu. On the left is a toolbar with all of the audio tracks about the painting and on the right, users can view the Timeline of da Vinci’s life and the Mona Lisa’s provenance, the Scale function to see the size of the painting compared to an average person, a Glossary of artistic terms used in the voice over and accompanying narration, and a Bibliography of referenced and cited sources.
“The Model” page
The voiceover, flash video, and narration clearly explains the features of the Mona Lisa, including The Support (the history and restoration of its wood frame), A figure in space (describes its harmonious composition), The Model (a description of Mona Lisa’s outfit), Light and Shade (da Vinci’s use of color and shading to replicate natural sunlight), Who is the Mona Lisa? (a history of the “real” Mona Lisa figure), The Work in Its Time (compares the work to other Renaissance portraits), and The Work in Leonardo’s Career (Mona Lisa in the context of other da Vinci works). Users who are deaf, have difficulty listening, or dislike audio narrations can mute or stop the track and follow along with the written narration to the right. I noticed that the written text does not always match the content of the audio track, but it is a nice option that permits different types of uses.