In Boon to Art Historians, Leading Museum Will Make Digital Images Available Free
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=1747
A recent announcement significantly broadened the access art historians and others will have to high quality images of Britain’s Victoria and Albert Museum vast repositories of "works in design and the decorative arts from cultures around the world." The museum will make digital images of objects in its collections freely available to scholars beginning in early 2007.
Visitors to the Collections Online Web site http://www.vam.ac.uk/ will soon be able to download high-resolution files free of charge.
UIT-AT partnered with the Tufts University Department of Art and Art History and the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives group to create a system that would support access to high-resolution digital images for presentation in Art History courses. Read more at Teaching and Learning Art History with Digital Images http://uit.tufts.edu/?pid=569&c=405
According to Department Chair and Associate Professor Cristelle Baskins, *The biggest change is that my first impulse now is to grab a JPEG rather than to run up to the slide room."
While the Tufts art history instructors are beginning their use of digital images, Yale's Robert Nelson describes how teaching with digital images has changed the way he teaches and students learn in Academic Commons' Digital Interview Series.
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/interview/digital-interview-series-robert-nelson
Nelson describes how his technique is evolving away from showing side-by-side comparison art slides:
"I’m beginning now to show single images in relatively rapid succession and then when it comes time for a comparison I will downsize the crucial image, which they’ve seen in several different ways before, and then show comparisons."
Putting up a quotation from a primary text for general class discussion is one Nelson's favorite techniques "to apply their readings and the lectures to the quotation. This text is then made part of the course material that they prepare for exams."
Whether you are an art history major or simply interested in art, you may want to check out SmartHIstory http://smarthistory.blogspot.com/ Beth Harris and Stephen Zucker are art historians at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and have been using their blog to post podcasts and vodcasts of their audio explanations of artworks that play while the students are looking at the images.
Their site was mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education's article, "It's Not Your Father's Art-History Intro: Professors Talk About How They Are Shaking Up Survey Courses" http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/02/2006022705n.htm.
