In Focus
April 10 - May 26, 2017
Photographs have had a home in the book format since the earliest days of photography. However, the interest in and study of the ‘photobook’ as a form is a more recent phenomenon. The definition of a photobook is still fluid in critical discussions, and perhaps it is this lack of rigid characteristics that makes the art form so interesting to collect and study. This exhibition highlights the work of the Arts and Beinecke Libraries to collect photobooks in a wide variety of formats and explores how the collecting practices of these two libraries intersect and complement each other. Together, these two collections offer a broad historical context in which to examine and critically engage with this emergent form.
Image copyright. Peter Malutzki. Used with permission. From Lucy in the Sky: Big Brother is Watching You…
Decompress from end-of-the-year stress by helping create a database of Yale theater history with Ensemble@Yale! This new tool leverages the power of crowdsourcing to identify and transcribe titles and dates of plays as well as the names of actors, directors, playwrights, set and costume designers, etc. from historical programs in Arts Library Special Collections dating back to 1925. Ensemble@Yale, inspired by the original Ensemble project from NYPL Labs, is an experiment that aims to transform historic programs from Yale’s archives into searchable text. Rather than reproducing all of the words in a digitized document, as with optical character recognition (OCR), crowdsourced transcription relies on human judgment to pull out features of interest to scholars and create structured data. Someday this data will allow researchers to answer questions such as "Who has played Hamlet onstage at Yale?"