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Franklin Toker, History of Art and Architecture,
says his project “puts us into the foremost
ranks of art historians teaching with what is
now appropriate technology.” The project moves
the core instructional technology in teaching
the history of art and architecture from slide
projection to digitized-image storage.
The project, Catalogue and Name
20,000+ Visual Scans for Digitized-Image
Teaching will turn a currently unusable
backlog of individual scans into a powerful
teaching resource.
Funding will be used for a computer
server for storage, a cataloguing and retrieval
database and employment of one person to give
meaningful titles and a data base backup.
A faculty member at Pitt for 20 years, Toker is
regarded as the one of the pioneer professors at
Pitt, and one of the first half dozen in the
United States to employ digitized scans, rather
than slides, for visual resources in teaching.
He has done so since 1998, when he
stopped using slides to teach the history of
art. Digital
scans offer freedom from slides while providing
comparable or superior images.
“We’ve been moving incrementally
since 1995, but the scans have to be catalogued
to be of any use.
With this project, the scans will be
accessible to the entire University,” Toker
said. |
Franklin
Toker |
The
images to be catalogued start with an old departmental
slide collection dating back to 1925.
“These old slides are a vast treasure and are
still in use as slides; but transformed into digital
scans, they will gain new life and a vastly wider
potential use,” Toker said.
Scans can improve the visual quality of images
and, unlike slides, do not deteriorate from use or age.
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