Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Today's edition of Saturday Sharing lets you play several games of tag, introduces you to a wonderful photography site, identifies where you can go on the Web to find artist-created walks around New York boroughs, tells you about that LibraryThing, and gives you a peek into some of the Stanford University digital collections you can access online.

✦ Have you ever played tag? A new form of open-source electronic gaming, Metadata Games, funded with a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start Up Grant, is being developed in association with the Tiltfactor™ Laboratory to identify ways to effectively promote access to archival information via rich "meta tags".  The pilot project, described here, includes the game "Zen Tag", in which participants name what they see, and "Guess What?", in which players have to select a single image from an array of images using clues received from a networked partner. Click the links to the games' titles to play either of these games.

Arcade Page

NEH Library of Funded Projects Page for Metadata Games

Jennifer Howard, "Gaming the Archives", The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 23, 2011 (This is a very good article about the project.)

Museum Metadata Games

(A thank you to the Smithsonian's The Bigger Picture blog, where I first saw a link to Metadata Games.)

✦ In addition to allowing you to catalogue your own books and access your catalogue wherever you are, LibraryThing lets you "share" your libraries with others, exchange reading suggestions, make book recommendations, and read reviews. You can find local bookstores and libraries, too, as well as current lists of literary events in your hometown. LibraryThing also is where you'll find the contents of the legacy library of Marilyn Monroe.

✦ The site A Photo Editor is one for your blog rolls. In addition to such posts as "What to Do When Your Image Is Stolen Online" and "Sobering Truths About Making a Career Out of Photography", you'll find interviews, museum acquisitions, news of photography publications, photography competitions, and videos. 

A Photo Editor on Twitter

✦ If you enjoy books, art, food, film, and travel, you'll enjoy the online magazine The Feast. I especially enjoy the Artist Spotlight blog, edited by Rosemary Carstens, which is accessible on the menu bar.

✦ Elastic City commissions artists to create "sensory, ritualistic, or other conceptual" walks in urban spaces. Some of the walks will cost you nothing; others require a fee. Currently, walks, which typically are 90 minutes to two hours long, are scheduled through early August around Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx; the schedule is here. Each walk gets its own page on the Elastic City site. For FAQs about the artistic project, go here.

Reshaping New York Through New Walks: Elastic City Blog (The blog includes slideshows, video, interviews, and other walk-related information.)

Elastic City on FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr

✦ Under the auspices of Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program, the "Journeys South" program, begun in April and concluded earlier this month, offered its own version of "interactive" walking tours involving artists.

✦ The online digital holdings at Stanford University include the !WomenArtRevolution (!W.A.R) collection, which includes artists' and critics' interviews, videos, and other information related to filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson's documentary about women artists' struggles in the 1970s with artworld status quo. Among the artists featured as key founders of the feminist art movement in the United States are Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro.

!WomenArtRevolution Website

!W.A.R. Blog

!W.A.R. on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Other notable collections accessible online include The Monterey Jazz Festival Collection, with a database of more than 50 yeas of musical performances, artist interviews, and related audio and video content; the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection; the Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, numbering more than 16,000 images; and History of Artificial Intelligence.

Monterey Jazz Festival  (Go here to find out about this year's festival, now in its 54th year.)