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Imaging rare, unusual, and intriguing objects at the Brown University Library

Monthly Archives: December 2012

Harlem’s Black and Jewish Music Culture 1890-1930

December 14, 2012 by | 2 Comments

“You can take your trunk and go to Harlem”

Currently on view at the Harlem restaurant, Settepani, is “Harlem’s Black and Jewish Music Culture 1890-1930,” an exhibit of framed sheet music that tells a story of collaborations between the neighboorhood’s black and Jewish composers, performers, and music publishers during the late-19th century into the 1930s. The exhibit illustrates “the rich musical life that was prevalent in Harlem in the late 1800s and early 1900s” and includes music performed by the Jewish singers Sophie Tucker and Belle Baker and written by black composers including Bert Williams, Eubie Blake, W. C. Handy and C. Luckeyth Roberts. The New York Times article “Harlem Music Culture, Black and Jewish” explains that as John T. Reddick, Harlem historian, was amassing his collection of ragtime, jazz, blues and patriotic marches, he was also was conducting research and discovering that many of the performers lived side by side on the streets of Harlem.

“The Darktown Strutters Ball”

 

Two of Brown University Library’s sheet music collections are incredibly complementary to Reddick’s collection and exhibition. The African-American Sheet Music collection chronicles the rise of African-American musical theater. The works of African-American popular composers, including James Bland, Ernest Hogan, Bob Cole, James Reese Europe, and Will Marion Cook are a prominent feature of the music of this period. The Yiddish Sheet Music collection is focused on the Yiddish-language musical stage from the 1880s through the 1940s. Notable performers and theatrical personalities represented are Molly Picon, Bores Thomashefsky, David Kessler, Jacob Adler, Aaron Lebedeff, Abraham Goldfaden, Mrs. Regina Praeger, and Cantor Gershon Sirota, among many others. The sheet music covers are image-rich in cover art, often including strident racial images which have lost none of their power to shock. The covers often include scarce and otherwise unavailable portraits of African American and Jewish performers who were well-known in their day. The collections include references, on-line resources, and contextual materials, such as a slideshow illustrating “A Century of African American Music.”

“Harlem’s Black and Jewish Music Culture 1890-1930: Selections from the Sheet Music Collection of Harlem Historian John T. Reddick” is on view at Settepani until Febuary 28th. Reddick is guiding a cultural walking tour of historic Harlem which explores connections and highlights sites associated with Harlem’s Black and Jewish music culture until December 30th.

“I’m just wild about Harry”

“Yiddle on your fiddle, play some ragtime”

“Walt Whitman” by Edwin Honig, inscribed to Roger E. Stoddard

December 11, 2012 by | Comments Off on “Walt Whitman” by Edwin Honig, inscribed to Roger E. Stoddard

Below is “Walt Whitman,” a 1965 concrete poem in the shape of a pine tree by Edwin Honig (1919 – 2011, founder of Brown’s graduate writing program), personally inscribed to Roger E. Stoddard (Brown class of 1957, and former curator of the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays at Brown University Library). Books relating to Stoddard’s bibliographic work are currently on exhibit at the John Hay Library through December 14, 2012.

360 Degrees of Advent

December 7, 2012 by | Comments Off on 360 Degrees of Advent

Advent Calendar – main view

Although I generally photograph books and flat documents, I occasionally have the opportunity to photograph three-dimensional objects. Depending on the type of object (this fold-up calendar, cuneiform tablets, a mummified crocodile!), I use different lighting setups and camera techniques. As I photograph these rare objects, I’ve become more and more interested in trying to represent them in as close to three dimensions as possible.

In lieu of a 3-D scanner, I have been experimenting with creating 360˚ rotating views of the objects. Done as sort of a proof-of-concept project, I photographed this Advent calendar, part of our Harris Broadsides Collection, using 360˚ rotating processes.

The process is actually pretty straightforward: you set up your camera and lights (all your settings and positioning must stay the same); and your object must be stable, and centered on a surface that can be rotated in small increments (as close to every 5˚ or every 10˚ as possible). While you can buy these devices, we took a more DIY route and made one using a lazy susan. To ensure that I rotated each shot only 10˚, my coworker generated an Adobe Illustrator file that had each 10˚ marked out exactly. While we have since started using a 5˚ model for better accuracy and more smooth rotations, it worked quite well:

The two different printouts I use when making 360˚ images.
Left: the printout used for this setup, with markings every 10˚, yielding 36 shots;
Right: our newer printout with markings every 5˚, yielding 72 shots.

I then used the Illustrator printout to mark off 10˚ on the lazy susan, centered the calendar on the surface, and began shooting. I lined up a spot on my shooting table which I could line up with each marking, and made my shots. I ended up with 36 images, and removed the background from each one.

Advent-10
The Advent calendar with background, showing its placement on the lazy susan and the 10˚ markings used in capture.
Advent 10-2
The same image, with the entire background masked out using clipping paths (just as in the “Coffee Pots and Clipping Paths” post).

While we can upload the images to the web and create interactive rotation using HTML5 & JavaScript, we can also produce movies that allow for a similar viewing experience. We also hope to work with our repository team to add zoom and angle-of-view functionality. Below is a sample movie: