Smarthistory is a free, art history Web-book that uses a Creative Commons license and conversational copy to make complex information about art accessible and engaging. Targeted toward university students, the site is also visited by professors, graduate students, high school students, travelers, museum visitors and other informal learners, especially creatives.
Drs. Steven Zucker and Beth Harris started Smarthistory more than four years ago when they realized they’d developed quite a bit of content for their online Western art history course. At the same time they were creating alternative audio and video guides, to the works found in standard art history survey texts, and posting them to a blog. They eventually organized the files stylistically and chronologically and began adding text and still images. In the late Spring of 2008, they received a grant, to redesign the site, from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
The visual navigation (on the home page and on the object pages) doubles as a timeline placing individual works of art front-and-center in a historical framework. Visitors can enter and explore the site using several navigation paths, depending on their needs and interests: by style, chronological period, artist, theme, or by using a prominent visual navigation. It’s an entertaining, occasionally even playful, delivery model and supports content that consists of spontaneous conversations about works of art where the authors are unafraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy.
Believing that Smarthistory is not only broadly applicable to their discipline but also a step toward understanding how art history can fit into the new collaborative culture created by Web 2.0 technologies, the content is modeled on the experience that Drs. Zucker and Harris want their students to experience while exploring art history. It’s a series of unpredictable discussions, rather than monologues, that compel people to learn the subject in meaningful and personal ways and presents topics and ideas that hopefully will transform the way people think about and understand art history.
• Smarthistory contains hundreds of images and more than 225 videos and invites photography via a Flickr group.
• The content management system is the open source MODx.
• Video content is recorded using a simple Zoom H2 and edited using GarageBand, Creative Suite, QuickTime Pro and ScreenFlow.
• Since launch, the site’s received over half-a-million visitors, many of whom visit Smarthistory based on recommendations by individuals and institutions such as libraries.
• New material will include the second half of the Western survey but the authors also look forward to broader collaborations with art professionals and institutions that will allow coverage of pre-Renaissance and non-Western art.
Drs. Steven Zucker and Beth Harris started Smarthistory more than four years ago when they realized they’d developed quite a bit of content for their online Western art history course. At the same time they were creating alternative audio and video guides, to the works found in standard art history survey texts, and posting them to a blog. They eventually organized the files stylistically and chronologically and began adding text and still images. In the late Spring of 2008, they received a grant, to redesign the site, from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
The visual navigation (on the home page and on the object pages) doubles as a timeline placing individual works of art front-and-center in a historical framework. Visitors can enter and explore the site using several navigation paths, depending on their needs and interests: by style, chronological period, artist, theme, or by using a prominent visual navigation. It’s an entertaining, occasionally even playful, delivery model and supports content that consists of spontaneous conversations about works of art where the authors are unafraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy.
Believing that Smarthistory is not only broadly applicable to their discipline but also a step toward understanding how art history can fit into the new collaborative culture created by Web 2.0 technologies, the content is modeled on the experience that Drs. Zucker and Harris want their students to experience while exploring art history. It’s a series of unpredictable discussions, rather than monologues, that compel people to learn the subject in meaningful and personal ways and presents topics and ideas that hopefully will transform the way people think about and understand art history.
• Smarthistory contains hundreds of images and more than 225 videos and invites photography via a Flickr group.
• The content management system is the open source MODx.
• Video content is recorded using a simple Zoom H2 and edited using GarageBand, Creative Suite, QuickTime Pro and ScreenFlow.
• Since launch, the site’s received over half-a-million visitors, many of whom visit Smarthistory based on recommendations by individuals and institutions such as libraries.
• New material will include the second half of the Western survey but the authors also look forward to broader collaborations with art professionals and institutions that will allow coverage of pre-Renaissance and non-Western art.
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