I left off last month promising details of how the work of early nineteenth-century American antiquarians has, over the last two centuries, morphed into the work of cataloging, archiving, and collecting, of how the “science” of antiquarianism has become the “science” of information. To address this shift, we might start by looking at how the ...
This image, a favorite around AAS, is part of a series a lithographs that circulated in the late 1820s and early 1830s, depicting people as an amalgamation of various objects: shells, vegetables, paintings, and in this instance, relics. This graphic motif harkens back to the Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose portrait heads made of similar ...
Under cover of night on the Dublin docks in 1784, Mathew Carey, disguised as a woman, set sail for Philadelphia. Having spent the previous week hiding out in his friends’ bookshops along Grafton Street, Carey decided that this was the only sure way to escape the British officials who were in hot pursuit of him ...
Last week, about twenty AAS catalogers, research fellows, curators, and other staff members gathered to discuss the challenges that come with transforming the visual code of an image into a written code. The creation of metadata in the form of indexing images is an inexact science, and it is one challenge that faces us as ...
Molly O’Hagan Hardy is AAS digital humanities curator and an ACLS public fellow. Every month on Past is Present she will be sharing news on digitization efforts at AAS, coverage of digital humanities projects using AAS materials, and ideas for such projects. Stay current with all things DH at AAS by checking out the “Digital ...
