January 2016 Archives

The Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) is excited to share that Monica Ong Reed has joined on as our User Experience Designer. An M.F.A. graduate in Digital Media from the Rhode Island School of Design, she first came to Yale as designer for the School of Music (2007-2015) to lead initiatives in web and mobile publishing. Her design for the YSM website was nominated for a Webby Award in 2014 and recognized by the W3 Awards and the Connecticut Art Director’s Club.

Monica is coming to the DHLab from the Yale School of Music, where she created the user interface for the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments’ online catalog, providing a framework for multi-media discovery experiences. Monica will be instrumental in designing the visual appearance and user experience of rich-client, web-based projects coming out of the Lab.

Monica will be working in the DHLab (Sterling Memorial Library, 316). Please stop by to welcome her!

The Digital Humanities Lab would like to congratulate the recipients from the inaugural round of DHLab Training Scholarships: Andrew Wang (first-year PhD student in English), Masha Shpolberg (third-year PhD student in Comparative Literature and Film & Media Studies), and Graziano Krätli (Digital Projects and Technology Librarian, Divinity School Library). The $500 awards will help support their participation in week-long courses at the upcoming Digital Humanities Summer Institute. The courses include: "Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements," "Digital Storytelling," and "Digital Humanities Databases."

DHLab Training Scholarships are open to Yale undergraduates, graduate students, and librarians. There will be a second round of Training Scholarships announced and awarded later in the spring semester. For more information, please visit DHLab Training Scholarships.

Mark your calendars for this upcoming Arts and Humanities Book Talk on Monday, February 1 with author Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Chace Family Professor of English and Director of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University. It will take place in the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall at 4:30pm.

A picture’s title is often our first guide to understanding the image. Yet paintings didn’t always have titles, and many canvases acquired their names from curators, dealers, and printmakers—not the artists. Taking an original, historical look at how Western paintings were named, Picture Titles shows how the practice developed in response to the conditions of the modern art world and how titles have shaped the reception of artwork from the time of Bruegel and Rembrandt to the present.

The author begins the story with the decline of patronage and the rise of the art market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the increasing circulation of pictures and the democratization of the viewing public generated the need for a shorthand by which to identify works at a far remove from their creation. The spread of literacy both encouraged the practice of titling pictures and aroused new anxieties about relations between word and image, including fears that reading was taking the place of looking. Yeazell demonstrates that most titles composed before the nineteenth century were the work of middlemen, and even today many artists rely on others to name their pictures. A painter who wants a title to stick, Yeazell argues, must engage in an act of aggressive authorship. She investigates prominent cases, such as David’s Oath of the Horatii and works by Turner, Courbet, Whistler, Magritte, and Jasper Johns. Examining Western painting from the Renaissance to the present day, Picture Titles sheds new light on the ways that we interpret and appreciate visual art. All are welcome!

From January 11-March 11, 2016, a temporary banner exhibition will be on display in the Sterling Memorial Library nave, in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his wife Coretta Scott King.  

The visits to Yale by Martin Luther King Jr (1959 and 1964) and Coretta Scott King (1969) are documented in Manuscripts and Archives in the Yale Library. Dr. King was invited to Yale in 1959 by an undergraduate lecture committee and spoke on “The Future of Integration.” He returned to Yale in 1964 to receive an honorary degree, along with Averell Harriman, Philip Jessup, Sargent Shriver Jr, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne. Dr. King was released on bail from the St. Augustine, Florida jail, just two days before receiving the degree from Yale. He had been arrested for ordering food in a whites-only motel. Dr. King’s honorary degree caused considerable reaction, both pro and con, around the country.

Coretta Scott King was named the first Frances Blanshard Fellow at Yale in 1969. While on campus she met with women graduate students and spoke to a standing room only crowd in Woolsey Hall on the importance of campus unrest in addressing social injustices.

The materials in this exhibition are reproductions of records from the Office of the President, Kingman Brewster (RU 11); Office of Public Affairs and Communications, Yale Events and Activities Photographs (RU 690); Buildings and Grounds Photographs (RU 703), the Helen Hadley Hall Fellowship Program (RU 9), and YaleNews.

Several ProQuest resources are now available via the Yale Library including the newly-released House of Lords Parliamentary Papers, several magazine archives, many historical newspaper titles, and data delivery (for text and data mining purposes) for several of the products. The included resources are described below and are now available to the Yale community in Orbis, the Databases A-Z list and are also discoverable in Articles+.
 
House of Lords Parliamentary Papers with data delivery
British Periodicals IV with data delivery (the library already has British Periodicals I-III)
Harper’s Bazaar Archive, 1867-present
Women’s Magazine Archive with data delivery
Country Life Magazine Archive
Periodicals Archive Online Foundation Collection with data delivery
German Literature Collection
Historical Newspapers that have been added include:
Cincinnati Enquirer (1841-1922)
Austin American Statesman (1871-1975)*
Cleveland Call & Post (1934-1991)
Dayton Daily News
Indianapolis Star (1903-1922)
Louisville Courier (1830-1922)
Nashville Tennessean (1812-1922)
Newsday (1940-1984)*
*Austin American Statesman and Newsday will have a new year of content added annually
 
In addition to these purchases, the library has initiated subscriptions to two ProQuest databases:
Fold 3 Library Edition
CBCA -Education (Canadian Business & Current Affairs)
 
Funding was contributed by Humanities Collections & Research Education, the Lillian Goldman Law Library, the Yale Center for British Art Reference Library, the Medical Historical Library, the Haas Family Arts Library (Drama Collection), the Center for Science & Social Science Information, and central Collection Development. Any questions can be directed to daniel.dollar@yale.edu.