There are gender wars, and then there are casualties. It wasn’t until 2011 that the behemoth toymaker LEGO acknowledged girls’ desire to build with bricks, even though the company had long before made a seemingly effortless pivot to co-branding, video games, and major motion pictures. So it’s little wonder that girls face all-too-real obstacles when […]
Read moreMonth: November 2011
A Hopi doll with painted headdress springs to life, spinning under my finger tips on a new iPad app from the University of Virginia Art Museum (UVaM).
The delightful app presents 19 different objects in 3D, to spin and zoom, providing an immediacy that rivals seeing an object in real life. In fact, it’s better in many ways than peering at an object through a protective case because the objects can be spun through a full 360°, view under bright lighting, at high resolution.
Personal exploration
The free app presents the mobile visitor with a grid of objects (below, left):
Metadata is a the glue that makes information useful. It is data about data. It could be a title, location, and camera settings for a photo; the history of a painting; the materials in a museum object; the authors of a journal article; or the time, date, and location of photo of a butterfly for a citizen science project. “Tags” added to blog posts, photos, or tweets are all a form of metadata, allowing others to quickly hone in on related items.
To make some sense of the sea of metadata, Jenn Riley mapped 105 metadata standards for cultural heritage. (more…)