Thursday, January 6, 2011

First Post of the New Year

Happy New Year! I tried to post this last night, but was having problems with Blogger for some reason. 

I hope to start writing some serious posts about Viking costume shortly, but tonight I just want to pass along two interesting links by Heather Rose Jones. 

One is to her Surviving Garments Database, a searchable database of information about surviving garments from surviving garments from Europe and the Mediterranean area dating from the earliest times until approximately 1500 C.E. As you'll see from the page, Ms. Jones is also interested in obtaining information to add to the database, so bear that in mind if you decide to check it out.

The other link is to a set of notes and rough sketches Ms. Jones made while viewing an exhibition of textile finds from the Tarim Basin called "Secrets of the Silk Road" at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California. The notes and sketches, though rough, are quite informative, though they make me wish for photographs of the finds!

Hopefully, I will get to write some more interesting posts this weekend.

9 comments:

  1. Thank you for the great links! Now if that database only had pictures of all the items as well... :P

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  2. Now if that database only had pictures of all the items as well...

    That would be nice, wouldn't it? You'd have to ask Heather Rose Jones about that. Still the DB is a great resource.

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  3. Thanks for the publicity for the database!

    On the question of pictures ... if I had all the permissions needed, I'd love to include pictures and entire articles and whatnot, but that simply isn't practical. Alas. I had to make some hard decisions about what to include and how closely I wanted to skate past copyrights and whatnot. In the end, I came down on the side of sticking to an annotated bibliography format.

    My top priority when I began the project (back in the '70s) was simply to make people aware of what existed and where it had been published. One item on the wish-list for the project is to include simple, highly schematic sketches of the garments, simply to provide a quick visual reference when scanning the results of a search. Another wish-list item that's a bit closer to reality is to include a brief 6-8 word description of each item for the same purpose. The problem is, I keep getting distracted by other projects!

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  4. Thanks for the publicity for the database!

    You're welcome! I see one of the functions of my blog as collecting useful resources for myself and my readers.

    I can see why you chose to limit your format. Aside from the copyright issues, including pictures would be a lot more work....

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  5. "On the question of pictures ... if I had all the permissions needed, I'd love to include pictures and entire articles and whatnot, but that simply isn't practical. Alas. I had to make some hard decisions about what to include and how closely I wanted to skate past copyrights and whatnot. In the end, I came down on the side of sticking to an annotated bibliography format.

    My top priority when I began the project (back in the '70s) was simply to make people aware of what existed and where it had been published. One item on the wish-list for the project is to include simple, highly schematic sketches of the garments, simply to provide a quick visual reference when scanning the results of a search. Another wish-list item that's a bit closer to reality is to include a brief 6-8 word description of each item for the same purpose. The problem is, I keep getting distracted by other projects!"

    Heather, thank you for creating such a great database! And I completely understand the difficulties involved in expanding the database to include more features, such as pictures. I am guessing you are familiar with the Scandinavian Runic-text database, Rundata? They have been struggling with the same problems, but are right now working on collecting pictures as well. The thing is you can't possibly do it on your own! At least, not without making it your full-time job... How about opening up for contributions?

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  6. As I said, one problem is that it's only one of my many projects. I do intend to keep working on it, but I have the "ooh, shiny!" problem. (I once started putting together a spreadsheet of my various research and writing projects and got up to about a hundred before I realized I was getting sucked into an endless recursion loop.) And, as you note, it isn't my day-job, which means that I tend to prioritize by what most strikes my fancy at the moment.

    I'm not quite sure which sense of "contributions" you mean. I'm always interested in having people contribute information about garments or publications that I haven't included yet (although I only update periodically, so the database doesn't yet include everything I have materials for). If you meant "solicit contributions of money so I can afford to _make_ it my day-job" ... I appreciate the thought, but ... no.

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  7. Haha, no I didn't mean money. =) Sorry, I forgot that "contributions" in english is often used like that. No I was still thinking of contributing pictures. Even if you can't include pictures of everything, perhaps it would be all right for others to contribute pictures of certain objects? I can imagine that even some museums could contribute with pictures as long as there is a clear reference back to them. Say your database could show a relatively small and poor quality picture and with a link back to museum so that if people want to see a more detailed picture they need to go back to the source. This database is really great and I'm thinking that a lot of museums could agree to something like that. Or what do you think? =)

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  8. Getting permissions to publish images of museum artifacts is tricky and complicated. (And this _would_ be "publishing", even if it's just a web site.) Very often even when the museum allows photographs, there's a restriction on how they may be used. If the museum itself wanted to give permission or provide photos for the project, that would be a different matter. But it would be far more work than I'm able to give to the project. I'd rather try to do a smaller project well (or at least "less badly") than to aim high and fail miserably.

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  9. Getting permissions to publish images of museum artifacts is tricky and complicated.

    Also time-consuming. I'm sure that's another reason why you prefer to keep your project more limited, so you cant do it well without having it eat your life.

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