Collections | c u r i o

Like Fishes Swimming in the Air

May 9, 2013 by rness | 1 Comment

Digital Production Services recently began digitizing broadsides from the Sidney S. Rider Collection on Rhode Island History. Rider was a Providence bookseller, publisher, and antiquarian, who presented the library with his collection (the largest private collection of materials related to Rhode Island), in 1913. The broadsides are being chronologically digitized with our Aptus-II 12 camera back, after being registered in our internal tracking system by our student assistants. To introduce the registration process to a student, I pulled a broadside from a box of 18th century materials. The item was dated March 16, 1752 and was published in Newport. The single sheet is a public notice for a course of experiments and lectures on the “newly-discovered Electrical FIRE: containing, not only the most curious of those that have been made and published in Europe, but a number of new ones lately made in Philadelphia.”

The broadside states that the daily lectures, given by Ebenezer Kinnersley, would take place in the council chamber at the Newport courthouse, at 3pm over the the course of a week, or two, in March of 1752. Two columns list topics of the lectures, facts regarding the nature and properties of electricity (“that our Bodies at all Times contain enough of it to set a house on Fire”, and that it has “An Appearance like fishes swimming in the Air.”) An explanation of Mr. Muschenbrock’s wonderful bottle (the Leyden jar), is also promised.

Ebenezer Kinnersley was a scientist, inventor and lecturer, involved with Benjamin Franklin’s electrical experiments in Philadelphia. In 1751, encouraged by Franklin, he traveled to New York, Boston, and Newport delivering lectures on “the Newly Discovered Electrical Fire”. It was during this series of lectures that Kinnersley first announced the effectiveness of the lightning rod, and made practical suggestions on how houses and barns might be protected from the “destructive violence” of lightning. The broadside indicates that the explanation of the cause and effects of various representations of lightening will prove to be “a more probable hypothesis than has hitherto appeared.” Kinnersly’s Newport lecture took place in March of 1752, a full three months before Franklin’s kite experiment.

Anyone sufficiently interested in enlarging their minds by attending the lectures, which were hoped to be “worthy of Regard & Encouragement”, could procure tickets “at the House of the Widow Allen, in Thames Street, next Door to Mr. John Tweedy’s.” Newport residents could not satisfy their interest in electrical fire for free, however. Tickets for the event would cost the curious thirty shillings.

A Great Gatsby; a poor speller

May 3, 2013 by lelgin | 5 Comments

Just in time for the release of the 2013 remake of the film, I came across this copy of The Great Gatsby.

This edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is notable for several reasons. It is a first edition from 1925. However, what makes it truly unique is the inscription; Fitzgerald dedicated this copy to T.S. Eliot. Although an “enthusiastic worshipper” of the poet, Fitzgerald has misspelled Eliot’s last name:

Copy of the first edition of The great Gatsby inscribed by F. Scott Fitzgerald to T.S. Eliot. Donated to the Brown University Library by Daniel Siegel ’57.

Detail showing the notation regarding T.S Eliot’s comments.

Written in pencil beneath the inscription is the barely discernible “Pencil comments by TSE.” Eliot read through the book, making comments in the margins in pencil throughout.

It should also be noted that I photographed this book differently than many of the items I digitize. In DPS, we often photograph books in a book cradle, page-by-page. However, this book was digitized for inclusion in the updated History & Guide, so I also provided photographs of the book as an object. I wanted to show the book as three-dimensionally as possible, and made a number of photographs showing it open in varying degrees, and from different angles.

A favorite shot is below, where you can see the front of the book. I had to use special lighting (a raking light from the right) to illuminate the blind-embossed title and author text.

View of spine, back and front of book.

Garibaldi Returns

April 26, 2013 by btylr | Comments Off on Garibaldi Returns

: Garibaldi scroll (side 1)

In late-summer 2007, the Brown University Library contracted with Boston Photo to photograph both sides of a unique oversize panorama scroll depicting the life of Garibaldi. After the initial capture files were processed and digitally merged together by Digital Production Services staff in the Library, they were used to develop a website about the panorama. The process of reconstituting the panorama’s narrative scenes from the initial set of discrete digital photographs is described below:

Example from the end of side 2: Yellow line represents edges of initial digital files, which were then merged together in order to visually preserve the narrative continuity of scenes.

Example from the (supplementary) end of side 2: Yellow line represents edges of initial capture files (which included on average .5–1′ of overlap). Files were then digitally merged together in order to visually preserve the continuity of narrative scenes.

The sheer dimensions of the Garibaldi panorama — 4.75′ tall and 260′ wide on each side — presented unique digitization challenges. Boston Photo Imaging, a digital imaging company, was contracted to capture digital images of the panorama as it was unrolled across a custom-built wooden platform. Using a vertically mounted Better Light 4″ x 5″ digital scan back, capturing both sides of the panorama took three days and resulted in 91 digital image files, each file ~244 MB and representing ~6.5′ of horizontal width (including on average .5-1′ of overlap, in order to facilitate subsequent image merging). The scan back captured 300 dpi RGB TIF files; given the height of the device this resulted in an effective real-world resolution of ~137 dpi at the actual size of the panorama.

Because scenes within the panorama’s visual narrative do not correspond to the uniform width used in the capture process, sets of capture files were digitally merged together five at a time by the Brown Library’s Center for Digital Initiatives [now Digital Production Services] staff, at full capture resolution within Photoshop CS3/v10, and then individual scenes were isolated and saved from these roughly 30-feet merged sections. A continuous image of each side of the panorama was produced by subsequently merging sequences of these five-section composites at a reduced resolution. As part of this process the plastic-over-board background initially visible along the top and bottom edges was digitally removed, and each merged group of five was slightly rotated in order to compensate for some inevitable alignment drift produced during the unrolling process. Tonal levels and saturation values were slightly adjusted, and files were moderately sharpened for full-resolution and reduced-resolution delivery sizes. [Read more from “Behind the Scenes”]

In early 2013, the Center for Digital Scholarship and its student employees substantially upgraded the Web presentation of the Garibaldi scroll. In particular, one can now view the scroll’s narrative scenes directly alongside their accompanying descriptive texts. Flash-based animated views of the scroll are also still available on the site, which allow click-throughs into zoomable views of each narrative scene.

In addition to the redesigned website, the scroll has also been (briefly) mentioned in a new book from MIT Press, Illusions in Motion by Erkki Huhtamo, and has been featured as a teaching tool in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, by way of Massimo Riva’s Fall 2012 course on Garibaldi and the Risorgimento.

Photographs of Napoleon’s Veterans in Uniform

April 12, 2013 by rness | Comments Off on Photographs of Napoleon’s Veterans in Uniform

Grenadier Burg of the 24th Regiment of the Guard of 1815

Digital Production Services has been digitizing Prints, Drawings & Watercolors from the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection for over a decade. 25,000 Digital objects from this collection are currently available, with additional artwork being added all the time. Over the years, there have been some memorable moments of discovery during the digitization process. I am always extra intrigued when a box of photographs from this collection arrives in the department. Old tintypes, daguerreotypes, and carte d’visites offer a clear and detailed window into the past, and I open these boxes with more relish and anticipation than most. When reviewing the materials in a box of French photographs, I was fascinated to have in my hands twelve original sepia views of aging members of Napoleon’s army, wearing their original uniforms and insignia. I now know that the twelve Frenchmen are quite possibly the earliest uniformed soldiers ever caught on film. The dignity, swagger, and intensity of the poses and the expressions of the aged men, combined with the extravagant Napoleonic military costumes, including bearskins, plumed shakos, shapkas, and mameluke swords, make these images truly exceptional.

Monsieur Moret of the Second Regiment, 1814/15.

It is not known at which studio the photographs were taken, or who the photographer was, but penciled on the back of each mounted print is the name of each veteran and his regiment. They all wear the Saint Helene medal, which was issued on August 12, 1857 to all veterans of the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, and it is possible that the men were in Paris the following year, for the annual May 5th anniversary of the death of Napoleon.

Peter Harrington, the curator of the Military Collection has written a detailed blog entry on the twelve men represented in the photographs, and made available a 2001 article entitled “Napoleon’s Veterans” he wrote for Military Heritage in which the photographs are featured.

Unusual Nature Poetry

April 2, 2013 by btylr | Comments Off on Unusual Nature Poetry

In honor of the changing of the seasons, Curio is featuring two (quite odd) visual poems from 1950 by Daniel H. McCalib (author) and Dennis McCalib (author-illustrator): “Love and Fecundity” and “Octopus-Sky” (images below link to zoomable views of each work).

“Love and Fecundity” (1950)

“Octopus-Sky” (1950)

Rhode Island’s First Political Rivalry

March 14, 2013 by Matthew McCabe | Comments Off on Rhode Island’s First Political Rivalry

Modern portrait of Hopkins. Collection of Brown University.

Flatbed scanning is a pretty routine task, often done by rote, earbuds firmly in place. Sometimes, however, a piece will catch my eye, make me curious, and send me to journeying across the Internet seeking answers. Such was the case recently, when I was working with items from the Rider Broadsides collection, which chronicles Rhode Island history. I grew up in Rhode Island, and received a bachelor’s degree in History from Brown before returning to the University for graduate studies in Public Policy. The focus of my undergraduate work was early U.S. history. In baseball jargon, this collection was right in my wheelhouse.

Portion of letter from Hopkins supporters, praising Hopkins and suggesting coalition.

The broadside that caught my attention features text from four letters between Samuel Ward, Stephen Hopkins, and supporters of the two men. I knew that Ward and Hopkins had been colonial governors of Rhode Island – and rivals – but that’s where my knowledge ended. Some research revealed to me that Newport, Rhode Island was the colony’s preeminent city in the early days, but by the 1750s, Providence had become a successful commercial port, and competition between the two cities manifested itself in a political rivalry. Stephen Hopkins, a friend and business partner of the Brown family of Providence, was first elected governor in 1755. Samuel Ward was supported by the Greene family of Warwick, and was aligned with Newport interests. The two men traded power, although Hopkins was far more successful, winning the governorship nine times to Ward’s three.

The broadside was issued in April of 1767, a month before the contentious election of 1767. Ward was the governor, and Hopkins was trying to replace him. The document was published by Ward, and contains the text of several letters to Ward from Hopkins and friends of Hopkins. The Hopkins faction suggests a power-sharing agreement, with the two sides splitting the various colonial offices. One group of Hopkins supporters, however, made the mistake of framing their proposal with a list of statements praising Hopkins and criticizing the current state of the colony under Governor Ward. This list is one reason that the Ward faction gave for rejecting the coalition proposal.

Hopkins won the 1767 election, according to one historian, with the help of, “personal influence, money, and liberal amounts of rum.” Hopkins only served a year before deciding to reach out to Ward to end their competition for the governorship. The ex-governors went on to serve as Rhode Island’s delegates to the Continental Congress; Hopkins became the first chancellor of Brown University.

Letter from Samuel Ward, rejecting coalition proposal.

Looking back at events like the Ward-Hopkins controversy makes us realize that we’ve always had factions in America, and we’ve found ways to move past them. This broadside, while a piece of Ward propaganda, was also an attempt to provide the “Freemen of this Colony” with both sides of the debate so they could “form a true Judgment of the Proposals which have passed between the Two Parties.” The day has passed when such pamphlets were universal touchstones that spurred debate. Modern media fragmentation makes it easy to go through life without exposure to contrasting views. I imagine men like Samuel Ward and Stephen Hopkins would have found such lack of meaningful debate objectionable.

~Matthew McCabe ’09 MPP ’14

Visualizing Temperance

March 8, 2013 by btylr | Comments Off on Visualizing Temperance

Ideally, data visualization techniques can facilitate discovery of trends within data sets, exposing previously unnoticed interconnections among and between data points, or otherwise confirm or dispute assumptions, which in turn can fuel further inquiry. But data visualization techniques, in the broadest sense, are also used for more message-driven or even outright propagandistic purposes. In many cases, the two modes of analysis — open-ended inquiry, on the one hand, and message-driven campaigns, on the other — quickly become intertwined in practice.

Below are some examples from the library’s “Alcohol, Temperance, and Prohibition” digital collection (a subset of the Chester H. Kirk Collection on Alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous). As noted in the digital collection’s accompanying online essay by Leah Rae Berk, the graphs, while visually convincing, are usually designed to suit exaggerated or predetermined causal claims, or else present only fragmented analyses, to stress the (no doubt oftentimes significant) influence of alcohol, above all else:

…A number of Temperance and Prohibition Era posters, like a number of the religious pamphlets, used a logos format to make a pathos appeal. These posters contained graphs and statistical information, presenting moral claims as factual information, such as “Alcoholism and Degeneracy,” “Intemperance as a Cause of Poverty Greatly Reduced Since Prohibition” and “Drink, A Great Cause of Immorality.” The poster “Drink, A Great Cause of Immorality” showed the results of a study of 865 Immoral Inebriate Women, claiming that 40% of their immorality was due solely to drink, including as evidence a statement by a medical expert: “There is no apparent reason why any of the persons…should have become immoral but for preceding alcoholism.” “Intemperance as a Cause of Poverty Greatly Reduced Since Prohibition” presented a graph that tracked the drop in poverty as a result of increased temperance, therefore conflating intemperance and immoral behavior with greater social ills like poverty….

“Drink Impaired Scholarship”

“Alcoholic Dogs…”

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