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

Monthly Archives: February 2013

Weaving Lives, Scanning Slides

February 18, 2013 by | 5 Comments

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Santa Maria, Guatemala

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Girl weaving on backstrap loom
San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Sacatepéquez, Guatemala

Picturesque landscapes, village life, and intricate hand-woven textiles are predominant features of the Margot Blum Schevill Collection recently donated to the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University. Schevill began collecting during her many trips to Guatemala as an anthropology graduate student in the 1970s. Her efforts culminated in a collection of over 200 textile pieces, thousands of images, and boxes of correspondence that represent her study of and appreciation for Guatemalan weaving practices, the symbolism of the vivid colors and patterns, and the cultural significance of traditional dress or traje.

In addition to being a graduate student in the Public Humanities Program here at Brown, I also work as a student employee scanning archival materials for Digital Production Services. Two of my peers at the Brown Center for Public Humanities, Anna Ghublikian and Maria Quintero, have been cataloging the Schevill collection for over a year now. Last year, Anna and Maria’s work aligned with an undergraduate student project that partnered with a Maya-Guatemalan weaving collective in nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts. The weavers in the collective – called Oxib’ B’atz (Three Threads in the K’iche language) – use traditional back-strap looms to weave textiles like those in Schevill collection. These traditional weaving practices not only produce beautiful works, they also help the Maya community retain aspects of its cultural identity in its new home in New Bedford.

This fall, Maria and Anna proposed an expansion of the initial project, which would display Oxib’ B’atz works with pieces from the Schevill collection. Their proposal, taken on as a student project and supported by much collaboration, has resulted in a temporary installation currently on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The exhibit Weaving Stories, Weaving Lives: Maya Textiles from Guatemala and New Bedford displays pieces of masterful weaving alongside images from the Schevill collection.  On Saturday, March 2nd, at 2:00 p.m., visitors to the museum will be able to see a demonstration by local Maya weavers using the back-strap loom to create beautiful textiles. Additional museum programming includes Maya textile-related crafts and children’s activities during School Vacation Week, and other programs through April 7.

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Santa Maria, Guatemala

In my role as a Public Humanities student, I have been working with the exhibit team to write guide text and assist with publicity. Meanwhile, in my position as a scanning assistant, I have been scanning hundreds of slides from the Schevill Collection. This collection, once fully digitized and cataloged, will be available through the Haffenreffer Museum, as well as ingested into the Brown Digital Repository. Slide scanning has been a departure from the typical flatbed scanning I had been performing. I learned the nuances of cleaning the slides with a static-free cloth and compressed air, how to orient the slides in the automatic slide feeder, and how to make use of Nikon SuperCoolScan5000 settings to save the files with identifying accession numbers. My hands-on experience with the slides has given me greater appreciation for the “Weaving Stories, Weaving Lives” project, and enough familiarity with the collection to help select some of the images I scanned for the exhibition, which I also helped to install before the official opening on March 2.

Further information on Margot Schevill’s work with ethnographic costume and textiles from Middle America and the Central Andes of South America can be found in the electronic copy of her book Costume as Communication.

– Jacquelyn Harris ‘13

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detail of textile created in San Mateo Ixtatán, Huehuetenango, Guatemala

 

 

 

Illuminating Postcards

February 13, 2013 by | 2 Comments

Arcade

While I generally work with objects and texts from Brown’s Special Collections, I also work with images for the instructional image collection with Karen Bouchard, the Scholarly Resources Librarian for Art and Architecture (she has a Twitter feed for the Brown Imaging Blog). These are images scanned for faculty members (primarily in History of Art and Architecture and Visual Art). For this project, I was digitizing postcards in the personal collection of Brown alumnus Seth Cohen, lent to Professor Dietrich Neumann for use in his lectures. These postcards – representing a range of locations and time periods – look at first like ordinary postcards, but illuminate in specific areas in the card when backlit. Sometimes, the backlighting shines through windows and doors in a bright, copper color; other times, the light brings forth a part of the image unseen when viewing normally.

The following are two animations of illuminated postcards: they start with the postcard lit normally, then move to two different strengths of backlight.

While it’s relatively easy to view one of these postcards – holding them up to a window or to a bright indoor light does the trick – capturing that in a photograph is much more challenging. After some trial and error, I devised a simple system to backlight the postcards with a light strong enough to show the layers of information, while still providing enough ambient light to read the information on the front of the card. I set up our Leaf Aptus II-12 digital back on its medium format camera, attached it to a tripod set to shoot straight down, and did tethered capturing into Capture One (the software we use to capture using our Leaf digital back). I used two Canon 580EXII flash units; one mounted on the hot shoe of the camera, and one functioning as a synched flash on the floor with a Gary Fong Lightsphere diffuser. I used an acrylic box to lay the postcards on, and put that on some boxes so that there would be some room between the flash on the floor and the postcards. I bounced the flash on the camera off the ceiling, so that it would provide a diffused ambient light that would neither overpower the postcards, nor cancel out the backlighting.

When Digitization and Ancestry Collide

February 7, 2013 by | 1 Comment

There are generally few personal revelations in the review and exportation of digital files. Once a group of materials has been scanned, I export the folder of digitized images into Adobe Lightroom, click through each image, checking that it is properly cropped, aligned, and does not contain any artifacts. It is fairly fast paced work, and does not allow for much reflection on subject matter. However, I did take notice during the review process of a box of Harris Broadsides. I was reviewing digitized images from “The Order of Exercises for Class Day, Monday, July 30, 1860, Bowdoin College.” As the third page appeared on the monitor, the name AMERICUS FULLER jumped out at me.

Americus Fuller is one of those solid and patriotic 19th-century names that one remembers if it figures in your family ancestry.  My first association with Americus Fuller, is in connection to his exotic Turkish leather ottoman, passed down to me in the 1970s. Was the poet named on the broadside I was reviewing, my grandmother’s great uncle Reverend Americus T. Fuller, missionary to Turkey?

Reverend Americus T. Fuller

The fact that the publication was from Bowdoin boded well…my family is from Maine. A quick check on Ancestry.com confirmed that Americus Fuller graduated from Bowdoin in 1859, prior to attending Bangor Theological Seminary. It was clear now that I was reading a poem written by my ancestor, a melancholic farewell for the graduating class of ’59 reflecting on the past toil of study, and looking forward to an unknown future.

Having the new knowledge that Americus was a “published poet”, I did a quick search for Americus Fuller in the Brown Digital Repository and our library catalog to see if perhaps he had penned anything else in our collections. Viola! He had also written a poem for the Freshman Supper at Bowdoin College, July 31, 1856.

In this Ode, Fuller reflects upon freshman year spent in “happy strife”, and looks ahead to becoming a dignified sophomore. Fuller’s  life story, albeit interesting, is now known and passed. He was a member of the Christian Commission during the Civil War, and served as a pastor in Maine and Minnesota, until his appointment as a missionary, first at Antitab, Turkey, then  Constantinople. In 1880, Fuller became President of the Central Turkey College.

Displayed in my home are 19th-century Turkish textiles, handiwork, and objets d’art collected by Americus and passed down to me. I have now added copies of two odes from Brown University Library’s  Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays to my collection of Fuller family related items. Yes, archives are full of secrets, and hidden gems are lying dormant in dark stacks waiting to have light shed on them. What a privilege it is to have the type of employment that such genealogical gems can be stumbled upon in the course of daily work.

 

 

 

Bowdoin College Campus, ca. 1860

Digitizing for “The Festive City”

February 1, 2013 by | Comments Off on Digitizing for “The Festive City”

In addition to items from the Brown University Library’s Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection and items from RISD’s collections, “The Festive City” — currently on exhibit at the RISD Museum of Art through July 14, 2013 — features rare 18th-century prints on loan to the RISD Museum from private collector and Brown alumni Vincent J. Buonanno. Many of the prints loaned to the Museum (example), as well as those from Brown University Library collections (example), were recently digitized by Digital Production Services. The reproductions of Buonanno’s loaned prints benefitted from our most recent digital camera reprographic setup (which uses an Aptus-II 12 80-megapixel digital camera back).

Buonanno’s loaned collection of Chinea prints — prints commissioned to document sovereigns offering tributes to the Pope, as yearly Roman festivals — represents the annual festivals in an almost complete set, spanning the 1720s through 1780s. Reviews of the “Festive City” exhibit were recently featured in the Boston Globe and Providence Journal.

Students in Brown Professor Evelyn Lincoln’s Spring 2010 Graduate Practicum in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture curated and produced a collection of related essays, “Reading Ritual: Festival Books from the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection.”

“Il Parnaso con Apollo e le Muse” (Gori Sassoli title); Giovanni Battista Sintes, 1680-1760 (etcher); Roma: 1733.