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In: Collection Items, comics, Digital Library, exhibit, Library, museum

The Jewish Museum of Florida is having a comics exhibit starting later this month. The exhibit details are online and below. I’ll be presenting on October 21 on some of the resources available on comics for teachers. Zap Pow Bam – Super Heroes of the Golden Age of Comics 1938-1950 OCTOBER 16, 2007 – APRIL 30, 2008 Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane! It’s Zap Pow Bam, a colorful dynamic exhibit that immerses visitors in an interactive world of Super Heroes, highlighting the Jewish creators of comic books. These are America’s timeless icons like Superman, Batman, Captain America, Captain MarvelRead More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library, games, Library

Looking for a few more Monopoly game images led me to vast railroad images, so the archives I’ve seen might be better for a railroad style game first or alongside a Monopoly style game. These are just some of the great Florida railroad images. A railroad game based on Florida would have so many possibilities because of the abundance of archival materials, so the question would be how to structure it. Most railroad games are strategy, building different railroads to make money or to defeat rival businesses. To really use the historical materials, a railroad game set in Florida would need to follow the history,Read More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library, games, Library

Monopoly is a great game for gaming history and for game studies because of its history as the Landlord’s Game which protested ultra-capitalism and because of its structure–a simple theme that changes in appearance with fairly standard rules, but also house rules (often related to landing on Free Parking). An interesting project would be to try and reconstruct a typical Monopoly game using historical objects. The image with this post could be a great starting point for a new Florida Monopoly based on historical Florida images. The game could be a simple re-skinning. Computer skins refer to the interface or object appearance, so Firefox canRead More →

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In: Collection Items, comics, Digital Library, imagetext, Library

UF’s Special Collections Library includes a popular culture collection with loads of comics. I’m currently working on a small grant to fund the digitization of some of these rich materials. In order to help support the grant, I made the collection page and digitized one sample issue of Will Eisner’s PS* Preventive Maintenance. Hopefully I’ll be adding a great deal more in the near future, and I’ll hopefully be doing it with support for a much larger project later on. In the meantime, UF’s Libraries will be presenting at the Jewish Museum in Miami, Florida on October 21, and I’ll post details on it asRead More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library, Library

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature (which is within UF’s Special Collections Department) is preparing an Alice in Wonderland exhibit based on the many versions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and their cultural influence and afterlife. I’m helping with the digitization of materials for the collection and they’ll be housed here. This collection and exhibit will be really exciting for the beautiful illustrations and the textual variety among the many versions (we have well over 150, but many are still in copyright).Read More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library

One of the projects in UF’s Digital Collections is Ephemeral Cities. The project is like Google Earth in that it spatially and contextually situates data and allows that data to be searched by term and category. The really neat part is that Ephemeral Cities does so using maps from around the turn of the last century (1890-1920). The old maps contain a great deal of information, and a lot of it relates to the local environment, culture, politics, and even the constraints of the time (like the way Key West developed in relation to water travel and then the overseas railroad). Eventually, it will beRead More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library, imagetext

I remember hearing a whole lot about Picasa when it first came out, but most of the interest seemed to be from people using Picasa for personal photos or from photographers. Now that I’m working with it, I’m astounded with how useful it is for academics. The ability to have local and web albums that can be shared with everyone, and that generate slideshows, and that can do embedded slideshows on websites is really wonderful for what many academics do. I’ve always saved my images to my website and just worked with webpages in general, but many people feel like they’re not good at technologyRead More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library

I’m now on the Library 2.0 Working Group and I’m trying to make a few fun things for people to see and use that are Web 2.0 style and that apply to the library. So, I’ve started experimenting with Picasa which I hadn’t used before. Now, I have a couple of Picasa albums online with images from UF’s Digital Collections. Picasa’s interface is extrememly clean and convenient, but I can’t seem to find a way to auto-sync the web and desktop albums. That minor complaint (or request) aside, the ability to quickly make and organize albums and screenshows makes Picasa a really wonderful resource forRead More →

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In: Collection Items, imagetext

Right now, I’m working on digitizing multiple versions of books about characters from the golden age of children’s literature, and this is one of the first Pinocchio books I’ve gotten online. I hope to have a number more soon. The variety of book forms and illustrations is extremely interesting, as each book offers a slightly different look at Pinocchio as a character.Read More →

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In: Academia, Collection Items, comics, imagetext

One of my current goals is to get materials online from awesome scholars who have the copyright to their work (often academic books return the copyright to authors after a set period of time). I’m extremely happy that the first book I’ve gotten to do this with is Donald Ault’s Narrative Unbound. Not only is Narrative Unbound important for Blake studies and imagetext/visual rhetoric/comics/textual studies, it’s also an important book because of what it shows about copyright and because it’s by Donald Ault, a great scholar who I’ve been lucky enough to work with. There’s so much more that I could say about Narrative Unbound,Read More →