New Classical Art Resources – CLAROS and ArtStor

Late last week the new CLAROS digital image system debuted.  This open project, based at Oxford with many international partners, provides access to digital images of classical art (and other collections). The images are searchable and browseable, with multiple facets possible (i.e., one can show all  skyphoi from Vulci).  Of special interest are the image-matching searches, available for classical sculpture and pottery, which use digital technology to examine an image you upload or link to and find matches in the CLAROS database.  The project also makes use of structured metadata (RDF, JSON, KML) and advanced users can create detailed SPARQL queries.

Not new, but new to UGA subscribers, we now have access to ArtStor (link takes you through the UGA system and will ask for a password if you are off campus).  This resource includes high-quality digital images with good metadata from museums and other collections around the world.  The site is searchable and browseable, and the creation of a free account allows the user to save images in groups and download sets of images to use offline.

From Claros: http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/XDB/ASP/recordDetails.asp?id=236C2446-5C9D-4DC9-8A02-8EB1095C6F48

Online Image Resources for Classics

When I present to classes, I often am asked to show them where they can find images of classical artworks, sites, or archaeological finds to use for presentations or even as references when writing a paper.  There are relatively few subscription databases that provide images; at UGA we subscribe to CAMIO, which has images from North American museums, including the MFA Boston and its collection of classical materials, but we don’t subscribe to ArtStor, the biggie in the field.  We do have a campus Visual Resources Center, with access limited to campus users (by arrangement on a per-class basis with the librarian).  But often students want free-web images.

Perseus has an Art and Archaeology Artifact Browser, which is somewhat limited in its coverage but provides good scholarly information for students.  A simple Google image search can find some things; limiting the search to .edu sites can be even more useful (one does this in the Advanced Search interface).  Flickr is another place to look – some faculty clearly stash their teaching images here, and there are a striking number of really good photographers who like to travel to Mediterannean sites and museums.  Especially useful is a group pool of more than 25,000 images at Flickr called Chiron, which collects Creative Commons-licensed images of the classical world.

I also remind students that for educational purposes, it’s fine to scan an image from a print book or scholarly article and use it in a powerpoint presentation or attach it to a paper.  We have several flatbed scanners in the Library, and in the Miller Learning Center scholarly commons building where my office is.

Next week I am taking myself firmly in hand and starting to review reference resources in classical philosophy.  Somebody hold me!

Reference Resources: Mythology

There are a lot of reference works on classical mythology published, with new ones out every single year, it seems.  Mythology is probably the classics topic with the most widespread appeal, from 2nd graders to 300-seat college lectures to Learning in Retirement programs, so many of the available mythological dictionaries and encyclopedias are targeted very broadly, and marketed to public and school libraries as well as (or instead of) universities.  What I would like in a classical mythology encyclopedia for college students is:

• clear summary of the various myths associated with a figure
• accurate and full citations to the primary sources for those myths (it is shocking how often these are not included)
• examples and discussions of depictions of those myths in classical art
• discussion of places, temples, rituals associated with the myths

So, obviously my favorite reference resource on mythology is Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC).  I first used it as an undergraduate, and when I was in graduate school the final volumes were not yet published, so we’d all scramble to choose mythological figures whose names began with the letters A-H.  Woe bedtide you if you got Zeus – no LIMC to do your legwork for you!  Now all the volumes are available (8 sets of 1 print and 1 plates volumes, for a total of 16 books).  At UGA our copy is at Main Reference (1st floor) NX650 .M9 L40.  Jenkins (no. 913) describes it as “by far the best source for locating and studying myths as they appear in ancient art” but does not seem as overwhelmingly fond of it for general purposes as I am.

Unfortunately, LIMC is a challenge for many undergraduates, especially those at the entry level – the level most likely to be studying classical mythology.  They are intimidated by foreign languages which they mostly do not read, and the terse (i.e. professional-level) citation style for primary sources in LIMC can be confusing.  I do show LIMC to many classes; many honors undergraduates and upper-level majors are happy to tackle it, and my goal is to make every grad student love and cherish it as I do.  But for the average 1000-level mythology student, it’s too much.  I will tackle some of the alternatives they turn to in forthcoming posts.