Stereoscopy Digitized
Last fall, the Brown University Library acquired a set of 100 stereographs made of Palestine in 1901. Stereographs are made using stereoscopy: a technique that involves creating the illusion of...
View ArticleReconstructing the Berrigan Airplane
Brown University Library’s Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays, housed at the John Hay Library, contains a wealth of poetry-related ephemera. A promotional flyer from 1969 — designed to...
View ArticlePortrait un-retouching
A few weeks ago, I was given a photograph to digitize – a pretty standard request in DPS. The photograph is a portrait of Alexander Nesbitt, co-founder (with his wife Ilse Buchert Nesbitt) of the Third...
View ArticleBlack, blue, and gray all over
Last month a blue-and-black dress sparked a mass-scale debate about color theory. Even the New York Times and magazines like Wired eventually weighed in, explaining how color perception is contingent...
View ArticleThe Unicorn of the Sea Comes to Brown
I often write about techniques to photograph unusual objects, or situations that involved photographing objects on site. This past Friday, however, we had the unique pleasure of photographing a very...
View ArticleCapturing the Transit of Venus
Recently, as part of Brown’s 250th celebration, my colleague and I were asked to photograph a selection of the many historical objects at Brown. Among these was the Transit of Venus telescope, a...
View ArticleFebruary
With the heavy snowfall and bitterly cold temperatures we have been experiencing this month, there is something that doesn’t quite ring true about John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “February.” Suffice to...
View ArticleA Public Art Mystery: part II (Polygons on Triangle)
Polygons on Triangle, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library, Brown University, c.196-? In preparation of the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library celebrating its 50th year this past November, Digital Production...
View ArticlePhotographing the Edwards Cane
Shortly before we left for our holiday break, I had another opportunity to photograph historical materials and objects from the Brown University Archives. We’ve had a number of interesting objects come...
View ArticleWinter Festival
As the semester winds down, we here at Digital Production Services hope your winter break is as enjoyable as this Russian winter festival from the early 1800s. Carl Ivanovitch Kollmann’s (1788–1846)...
View ArticleA Public Art Mystery (part I)
In preparation for the commemoration of the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library’s 50th year, Digital Production Services facilitated the digitization of a collection of photographs documenting the...
View ArticleThe Battle of Borodino
Detail from Battle of Borodino. Steel engraving by J. B. Allen (1803–1876). Just over a decade ago, a box of prints depicting French battles from 1811 and onward was selected from the Anne S.K. Brown...
View ArticleDigitizing the “mirror with a memory”
As we celebrate Brown’s 250th anniversary, Digital Production Services has been asked to digitize many historical university materials. Some of the earliest photographs in the university’s extensive...
View ArticleHistoria de la villa imperial de Potosí
Historia de la villa imperial de Potosí by Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela Colonel George Earl Church (1835-1910) was commander of a Rhode Island regiment during the Civil War, an engineer, and well...
View ArticleStreamlining Broadsides
Over the past year, Digital Production Services has been working on the digitization of one of the Brown University Library’s extensive collections of broadsides. The Rider Broadsides Collection...
View ArticleCircus Poetry (“While traveling with a circus almost had a fallin’…”)
The Harris Broadsides collection in the John Hay Library contains many poetry ephemera (limited edition posters, broadsides of various sizes, letterpress printed cards). Below is Leonard N. Lawrence’s...
View ArticleInside the Lost Museum
Detail of an interior view of Brown University’s Museum of Natural History, c.1871-1894 This year, visitors to the Brown University campus have the opportunity to visit a museum that no longer exists;...
View ArticleA more typical look at the camera room
Since I often concentrate on more involved or difficult setups, I thought it might be good to take a look at a setup that we are most likely to encounter at DPS on a day-to-day basis. This image shows...
View ArticleThe Accordion Player
The month of June was designated National Accordion Awareness Month in 1989, which makes 2014 its 25th anniversary. Highlighted below is a pen and wash sketch drawn by Horace Day (1909–1984) during...
View ArticleImages of the Great War
Over 25,000 prints, drawings, and watercolors from the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection have been digitized and added to the Brown Digital Repository, a portion of which feature World War I subject...
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