Collections | c u r i o

Interior Designs

January 4, 2013 by lelgin | 1 Comment

Much of the work that we do here at DPS involves objects and items from the Brown Library’s Special Collections. These are housed in the John Hay Library, which just recently celebrated its Centennial. It is a gorgeous building, and many of the simple, white wooden doors belie the beautifully curated spaces beyond.

The Bruhn Memorial Reading Room is one such room. When I was asked for photograph it for Brown’s new version of the History & Guide to Special Collections, I had never actually been in the room before. Home to part of the Special Collections, and featuring warm wood paneling and tall windows that overlook Prospect Street, the Bruhn Room is used for a variety of purposes within the library, from classes and private study, to candidate presentations and meetings, to videotaped interviews with students and visiting scholars.

It’s a beautiful space, to be certain, but it’s difficult to capture all of this photographically. To capture all the elements of the room; from the paneling and windows, to the many books, objects, furniture and chandelier, I had to make many exposures that I could use to blend together to create one single, merged image. I shot a great many images, varying both the exposures (to pick up the detailing under the tables, in the bookcases, and on the ceiling), and the white balance (to correct for the overhead lights as well as the window light from outside). Although I did use a specialized lens (a 24mm tilt-shift lens, like the one in this video) to correct for perspective issues, I also had to make a final perspective correction as well.

The final image came out very strong, and ended up being published in The Manuscript Society News (vol 31, no. 4). Below you will see the progression of images as I compiled the final image, building up exposures and color balance. n.b.: You can click on any image to make it larger, and then click through the images to view one at a time.

Image 1: Overexposure to capture shadow detail under table, in bookcases.

Image 2: A darker exposure to bring out the richness in the wood paneling, floors and walls.

Image 3: A MUCH darker exposure, to bring out the details in the ceiling, washed out in the previous exposures.

Image 4: Image correction in Photoshop to correct the ceiling color and luminance but preserve the detail of the chandelier.

Image 5: An additional, darker layer, to bring in ONLY the detail of the overexposed window.

Image 6: An exposure the same as Image 5, but set to daylight white balance to correct the blue tone.

Image 7: A slight darkening on the ceiling, along the strips of light that outline the arch.

Image 8: A minor contrast adjustment on the same strip of ceiling, to show the detailing and sculptural quality of the ceiling.

The final image, with perspective adjustments to compensate for shooting at a wide angle in an enclosed interior space.

Harlem’s Black and Jewish Music Culture 1890-1930

December 14, 2012 by rness | 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 btylr | 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 lelgin | Comments Off on 360 Degrees of Advent

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:

Walt Whitman’s Manhattan of the 1840s

November 9, 2012 by rness | 1 Comment

There are over 13,000 broadsides from the Harris Broadsides Collection currently available in the digital repository, with more being added as we work our way through digitizing the collection. This week, a brochure prepared by the American Society of Poets in the 1950s stood out as an artifact of interest. Walt Whitman’s Manhattan of the Forties: A Walk Through Printing House Square and Environs features a walk which reconstructs aspects of Walt Whitman’s New York in the early 1840s, when the city was “speeding toward the line separating the Knickerbocker town from its future materialization as an industrial metropolis”, and is peppered with Whitman’s poetry and anecdotes of mid nineteenth century life in the city.

The walk begins at St. Paul’s Chapel crosses over Broadway, continues up Ann, with a left onto Nassau to Park Place, on to City Hall, ending at Duane and Broadway. The brochure identifies sites and buildings with Whitman’s early career, at the time when he started to write for the newspapers. “It was here that Whitman worked as a reported in a milieu of corrupt politicians, cutthroat newspaper practices, yellow journalism.” The reader is urged to try and visualize Whitman at age 22, “a natty dresser, he probably looked like his stylish counterparts, who piddle and patter here in collars and tailed coats.”

The buildings and sites identified along the walk are the Astor House, the American Museum, The Evening Tattler (where Whitman served as editor in 1842), the printing shop of Park Benjamin (where Whitman worked as a printer upon first arriving in New York), and The Evening Mirror (Edgar Allan Poe began writing for the Mirror in 1844 and spent his noon hours across the street at Sandy Welsh’s (a famous beer cellar and popular hangout for newspaper men.) The New York Leader, Fowler’s Phrenological Cabinet (“where charts and physiological exhibits were on display to advertise this pseudo-science”), The Broadway Journal (also edited by Poe), Democratic Review, Tribune, Evening Post, The Aurora, The Evening Tattler, and Printing House Square are also identified. Printing House Square is the former home to The New York Times, The Sun, and the Tribune. All that remains of the square today is a memorial plaque and statue of Benjamin Franklin. The walk continues past Tammany Hall, the Empire Club (“gathering place for Five Points gangsters”) , Five Points (at that time, “a squalid cesspool of crime”), City Hall Park, the Tabernacle (deplored by contemporary writers as “a huge unsightly pile” and “a dingy mongrel place”), and many Boarding Houses, where in the 1840s “possibly more than half the population of the city lived, not only single young men like Walt Whitman, but couples like Mr. & Mrs. Edgar Allan Poe.”

The brochure cites several texts, suggesting that “taking one or two along on this tour would give the walker the best of all companionship.” The following titles from the list are available at the Brown University Library.
The times of Melville and Whitman
Last days of Knickerbocker life in New York
Nooks & corners of old New York
A tour around New York, and my summer acre
Domestic manners of the Americans
The memorial history of the City of New-York, from its first settlement to the year 1892
Autobiographia; or, the story of a life

Coffee Pots and Clipping Paths

October 25, 2012 by btylr | Comments Off on Coffee Pots and Clipping Paths

In addition to photographing Special Collections materials for ongoing digital projects, or for patron requests for publication, Digital Production Services also digitizes items to be featured in library-produced promotional publications. In 2008, a coffee pot once owned by “Dr. Bob” (Rober Holbrook Smith), a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was taken off the shelf and set against a simple white background to be photographed.

The photograph itself is a straightforward shot — at the time, captured using the John Hay Library’s Nikon Digital SLR camera. However, to remove the background for a publication layout, “clipping paths” were created in Adobe Photoshop. Clipping paths are a useful way to mask-out the background within a scene — in other words, clipping paths can be used to visually define the edge of an irregularly-shaped object which does not conform to a standard rectangle-based crop.

Above, L–R: detail of coffee pot digital image; detail of image with background removed via pixel-based selection; detail of image showing vector-based clipping path overlaying pixel grid; clipping-path-masked image as placed in final layout.

There are pixel-based methods of creating masks in Photoshop, although clipping paths offer a unique solution, storing resolution-independent Bézier-curved (vector-based) edges alongside the pixel-based image grid, particularly useful for layered layout designs. Curves used for clipping paths are the same vector-based curves now becoming more widely supported by web browsers, as part of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) specification and HTML5’s <canvas> tag scripting. (For an example of resolution-independent, vector-based curves implemented solely via web-based technologies, see this proof-of-concept site by a Google employee.)

The Impish Spirit

October 11, 2012 by rness | 1 Comment

Digitized materials relating to The Garibaldi Panorama: Visualizing the Risorgimento from Brown University Library collections are continuously being made available to the public. Part of my job is to ensure that images are cropped, rotated , exported in our processing software (Adobe Lightroom 4.1), and fit for publication. Every now and then, this work exposes me to a fascinating object that I have never seen before.

This week’s processing work included Lo Spirito Folletto, a 19th century Italian illustrated humor journal or fumetto (literally translated as “little puff of smoke”, referencing speech balloons). Lo Spirito Folletto (or The Impish Spirit), was one of the first newspapers of Italian political satire and was published weekly in Milan from 1861-1885. Brown University Library owns a single volume from 1863, which now has been fully digitized, and will soon be added to the repository.

The periodical is heavily and beautifully illustrated with woodcuts and lithographs, as Harper’s Weekly or The Illustrated London News, but the content is devoted to Italian political satire, caricature, wit and humor. Droll vignettes of imps, elves, goblins, and fairies are sprinkled among charades, riddles, puzzles, and articles lampooning Italian statesmen.

The richness and elegance of the artistic compositions, executed by gifted illustrators and caricaturists like Guido Gonin, Vajani, Vespasian (“Vespa”) Bignami, and Luigi Borgomainerio, resulted in the periodical gaining renown in Italy, as well as abroad. The newspaper was published in Paris as the L’Esperint Follet, and featured the best Italian designs together with works by distinguished french artists.

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

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