Lewis Wickes Hine
Work with schools, city history clubs : history club meeting… 1910s
New York Public Library: 434285

Here at Indicommons, we’ve been following the Museums and the Web 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado, via Twitter. Here’s a short round-up of papers of interest to The Commons being presented there this week.

Buckets and Vessels by Aaron Straup Cope:

With the mass of digital “stuff” growing around us every day and simple tools for self-organization evolving beyond individuals into communities of suggestions, is the curatorial prerogative itself becoming a social object?

This paper examines the act of association, the art of framing and the participatory nature of robots in creating artifacts and story-telling in projects like Flickr Galleries, the API-based Suggestify project (which provides the ability to suggest locations for other people’s photos) and the increasing number of bespoke (and often paper-based) curatorial productions.

Aaron also led a workshop called Machine Tags: Theory, Working Code and Gotchas (and Robots!)

Common Ground: A Community-Curated Meetup Case Study by Paula Bray and Ryan Donahue:

Why do institutions and on-line communities want to participate in face-to-face meetups such as Common Ground: a community curated meetup? Does this type of experience provide a deeper engagement with audiences and give institutions an opportunity to learn from these experiences? What are we finding in the process?

Can Structured Metadata Play Nice with Tagging Systems? Parsing New Meanings from Classification-Based Descriptions on Flickr by Joseph B. Dalton:

This paper discusses the rationale behind NYPL’s decision to combine existing metadata – in the form of subject headings – with user-generated tags, and demonstrates some of the challenges, benefits and drawbacks for institutions that may be interested in using similar approaches for their own collections.

Flickr as Platform: Astronomy Photographer of the Year by Fiona Romeo and Natasha Waterson:

Variously described as “wonders of the cosmos” (Daily Mail, 2009l) and “the best space porn of the year” (Davis, 2009), Astronomy Photographer of the Year is an annual competition and exhibition organised by the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

This paper will outline how we used the Flickr platform to reach new visitors, build a community of practice, develop an innovative standard for identifying and locating astronomy photographs (’astrotagging’), shortlist and judge competition entries, develop an on-gallery interactive showcasing all contributed photographs, and repurpose user-generated content for exhibition labels.

According to Flickr’s developers, “the integration is so seamless… you might as well consider Flickr to be their ‘backend’ serve.” (Kandalgaonkar, 2009).

Museum Commons. Tragedy or Enlightened Self-Interest? This last paper of interest has no true connection with The Commons on Flickr, however it raises and answers a fundamental question regarding the concept of a museum commons.

There has been an exciting surge of interest in the museum sector in expanding access to museum data through the classic idea of creating a commons. A Web-based multi-institutional museum commons could open up public access to collections, deepening contextual knowledge of objects and helping museum professionals recognize the unseen value of their own collections. For example, collections items that seem orphaned or fragmentary in one institution may enjoy a rich life on-line, once reunited with relevant collections and data from other institutions in an on-line commons environment. Commons-oriented intellectual property policies should also enable content sharing for educational and other non-commercial uses, or they may be used to facilitate new innovations or for-profit businesses beyond the scope of traditional rights-and-reproductions activities.

You might also enjoy scrolling back through the social media advice (@edmj/museum-socialmedia-advice) from MW2010’s unconference tweets!

There are plenty more papers to read; we’d love to hear what words of wisdom you found in them!

Last summer, during a roadtrip from Toronto to New Orleans and back, I took my family on a Memphis mini-adventure, to shoot a Commons “then-and-now”. After the Gibson guitar factory tour, after the tornado warning had ended (it missed us), after a relaxing beer and snacks at a Beale Street bar, where we chatted with the manager about MGMT and the kids signed the wall, we walked up the street in the drizzle to find #318 – or at least where #318 must have been. There’s no jitterbugging here anymore.

New York Public Library	Lú_ (Stephanie Fysh)
THEN	NOW

Nina Kuriloff is a New York-based painter whose selections from the Commons have enlivened our Best of the Commons posts recently. Many of our Across the Commons posts recently have drawn on her selections in themed topics in the Flickr Commons group, which this blog grew out of. This one, though, is special, because whether Nina knows it or not, many of the trees she’s discovered in the Commons, wherever they were found, echo her own paintings – Nina’s Trees:

Acacia tree and vegetation – Kenya, 1906

Field Museum

Large fig tree and native vine growing in the middle of sugar cane in the Logan district – Queensland, Australia, 1870

State Library of Queensland, Australia

Passaic River, below the falls (etching) – New Jersey, 1920

New York Public Library

Kembla fig tree – New South Wales, Australia, circa 1900

Powerhouse Museum

Baobab tree – Kenya, 1906

Field Museum

Burns Night celebrates the birthday of Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796), which was January 25. If you like Burns’ poetry, haggis, rutabagas, and Scotch whisky, you might like to find a Burns Night observance near you. Or just recite your favorite poem aloud and have a look at some appropriate images from across the Commons.

At a Burns Night in 1958, the festivities include the Piping in of the Haggis.

Galt Museum & Archives

It’s not necessary to dress up for Burns Night, but these boys posed in their finest for an Ellis Island photographer.

New York Public Library

Some music perhaps? The 92nd Gordon Highlanders at Edinburgh Castle in 1846.

National Galleries of Scotland

Modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis was born on 20 January 1879 (date as in the American National Biography; some sources give 1877, 1878, or 1880 instead), in New Jersey. I’ve made two purses with the set of images of her in the New York Public Library’s Flickr stream, and I know many, many other Commons fans have favorited her striking poses … Celebrate her birthday by doing a little barefoot dance, perhaps?

Ruth St. Denis in Radha

New York Public Library

Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in an out-of-doors photograph, in color

New York Public Library

Ruth St. Denis, a personal study taken out of doors at Mariarden

New York Public Library

creator]:Sherman, Augustus F. (Augustus Francis)
[Three Dutch women.], c1905
New York Public Library: 1206548

view + comment on Flickr

Portrait of strongman Don Athaldo

Powerhouse Museum

Bordoni

Library of Congress

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, photographed by Peter A. Juley & Son

Smithsonian Institution

Ida Fieldman, March 1945

Jewish Women’s Archive

Bath attendant Stella, Lysekil, Sweden

Swedish National Heritage Board

Laplander

New York Public Library

Ella Wesner, male impersonator

George Eastman House

Miss Estelle Doray, snowshoer, Montreal, Quebec, 1924

Musée McCord Museum

A child dressed in uniform, 1915

Australian War Memorial

Add the portraits you’ve found in The Commons to the Flickr Commons discussion group thread for portraits.

The Flickr Commons project lets us see the 19th-century beginnings of photography represented in a very 21st-century space. And among those early treasures, we have reminders that women were there at the very beginning, some of the first to embrace photography as an art and as a tool. Consider these four founding mothers:

Anna Atkins (1799-1871) is represented in the Commons by her Photographs of British Algae, found as a set in the New York Public Library’s Flickr stream. Atkins studied science as her father’s assistant and made illustrations of shells for his 1823 translation of Lamarck’s book on the subject. She collected botanical samples, and through both her father and her husband came to know William Fox Talbot, inventor of the negative/positive process. By about 1841 she had access to a camera, but she’s best known for her 1843-45 cyanotypes (sunprints) of algae specimens. She collaborated with another woman, Anne Dixon (1799-1864), on other albums of botanical cyanotypes.

Fucus nodosus (1843-53), New York Public Library

Mary Dillwyn (1816-1906) was also acquainted with William Fox Talbot through family networks: her older brother John Dillwyn Llewelyn (himself a photographer) married Talbot’s cousin Emma. Mary was using a small camera in the early 1850s, and made a specialty of rather informal portraits for the time. After she married a clergyman in 1857, she gave up photography. Her work is to be found in the LIGC-NLW (National Library of Wales) Flickr stream, including this self-portrait from 1853.

Mary Dillwyn M.D. 1853 [self-portrait], LIGC-NLW (National Library of Wales)

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), who was raised in India, only started taking pictures at age 48, in 1863, when someone gave her a camera as a gift. Through her sister, she knew Tennyson and other writers and artists, and drew from their work in her subjects and poses. Cameron was also forward-thinking enough to get each of her images registered with the copyright office. She continued to make photographs when she moved back to Ceylon in 1875, but it was hard to get the necessary supplies there. The George Eastman House and the National Media Museum Flickr streams both include examples of Cameron’s work.

Ophelia Study No. 2, 1867, George Eastman House

Baby “Pictet”, 1863, National Media Museum

Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake (1809-1893) wasn’t herself a photographer. She was an art critic who wrote one of the first and most influential essays about photography as an art form, in 1857, declaring that “[p]hotography is intended to supercede much that art has hitherto done, but only that which it was both a misappropriation and a deterioration of Art to do.” She was married to Sir Charles Eastlake, the first president of the Royal Photographic Society. A Hill and Adamson portrait of Lady Eastlake (an early subject of photography as well as an early supporter) c. 1845 can be found in the Flickr stream of the National Galleries of Scotland.

Hill and Adamson, Lady Elizabeth (Rigby) Eastlake, 1809-1893. Writer, c. 1845, National Galleries of Scotland

Your weekly round-up of the latest items from The Commons’ digital archives:

The New York Public Library also dazzles us with color images of the Hudson River Valley; this set coincides with their new exhibition Mapping New York’s Shoreline, 1609-2009. Pssssst! They are geotagged!

Mapping New York’s Shoreline: The Storied River

The National Library of Wales adds more sepia images of 19th-century Swansee.

Early Swansea Photography

26 new images from the Smithsonian; rain, shine, or hail – that postman always brings the mail!

People and the Post

Travel in style with more in-flight photos from the State Library and Archives of Florida.

Florida Flights of Fancy

Travel to France to enjoy the scenery with the Bibliothèque de Toulouse. Pssssst – they geotag, too!

Tarn-et-Garonne

They also have added to an interesting set on minerals.

Règne minéral

Cathedrals, steamers and runes are posted from the Swedish National Heritage Board.

Carl Curman – Sweden

The State Library of Queensland, Australia, posts a shot from an unknown photographer of Margaret Lawrie; be sure to click through the photo to read her story.

Picture of the week

Yay! 53 new newspaper illustrations from the Library of Congress!

Illustrated Newspaper Supplements