Digital Art Annotation

GENDHIST

8682Since summer 2008 we have been adapting the Distance Research Environment (DRE), developed first for the Mapas and Digital Galiens projects, for use in another newly emerging collaboration, the “Gender in History Digital Resources Collection” (GENDHIST). Here, we are inviting faculty participation to annotate images (whole works and their details), whether these are facsimiles of paintings, representations of objects, photographs of all kinds, or pictorial elements in manuscripts. The images are stored in a database we have been modifying, based on a gendered subset of materials being gathered by the digital collections staff at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, AAA library (Julia Simic), the digital specialist in the Knight Library (Karen Estlund), and Special Collections (Linda Long and James Fox). With the art museum alone determined to have digital versions of its 12,000 pieces of art, we have a great task ahead of us to add scholarly value to the bare-bones metadata and make the material more accessible for research. Jill Hartz, JSMA Director, is very supportive of this project and will help arrange for permissions for any annotated pieces that are not already in the public domain. So far, we have the following faculty agreeing to participate: Dianne Dugaw (English), Phaedra Livingstone (AAA), Lauren Kilroy (AAA), Amanda Powell (Romance Languages), Julee Raiskin (WGS), Elizabeth Reis (WGS), and Paul Semonin (a UO Ph.D. and community affiliate). We hope to recruit more faculty members to participate in this exciting project.

Chinese Scrolls Digital Collection

We have submitted a proposal to create a digital collection of historical Chinese scrolls to be annotated by Professor Ina Asim of the Department of History, plus her students and colleagues. With the excellent assistance of Garron Hale at the Social Science Instructional Lab on campus, Professor Asim has already digitized and annotated a seventeenth-century scroll that is currently offered for sale as an interactive CD, the Lantern Festival at Shangyuan. Two additional scrolls residing in the collections of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art are proposed to be added to the original scroll to begin to create a digital collection. It is our hope that students who participate in this project will travel to China to create partnerships with Chinese repositories in the construction of the collection, as a collaborative, international effort.