I am learning how to use ContentDM (CDM), the digital image management software that the SLU gallery uses to catalogue its internal permanent collection database and other published collections. It’s a program that’s geared more toward library special collections and historical societies, and so it’s not that great in terms of presenting large works of art on a monitor or wall screen. (By contrast, the gallery’s Canadian Inuit art collection is presented in Drupal; the images appear almost full screen and are much clearer.) What’s cool about learning CDM, however, is that I can now add misc. stickers here and…
FC St. Pauli stickers #2
I did a little more research and polished my previous blog post on St. Pauli stickers for two reasons: 1.) I needed a shorter, condensed version without links to use in the Street Art Graphics digital archive, and 2.) I will use this version in the traveling exhibition, Re-Writing the Streets: The International Language of Stickers. I can also use this exercise to show students the differences and similarities among a blog post, metadata for a digital archive, and an exhibition text panel. ————————————– Hamburg, the German port city home to the St. Pauli football club (Fußball St. Pauli or…
Vote Republican 1926 sticker
I recently came across a U.S. political sticker from Iowa in 1926 that is one of the first of its kind, from what I’ve seen, that isn’t an I.W.W. Wobbly labor union stickerette (see previous posts on I.W.W. stickerettes). What’s interesting, however, is how Ralph Chaplin, a 1910s-era I.W.W. key artist/agitator, talked about printed labels on various fruit and vegetable cartons that helped inspire him to create political stickers. I’ll dig up those references for a later post.
Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben
One of my students at SLU, Carolyn Dellinger ’16, is starting to catalogue the Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben that I scanned over the summer (see Berlin-based sticker collections in previous post). From 79 original raw scans, I came up with a total of 48 edited image files consisting of 16 complete stickers, 4 full sheets of “pre-Photoshop” color-separated stickers, and various individual color-separated stickers and overlays. Carolyn also created seven image files that are diptychs or triptychs to show the color separations side by side. The 54 image files in this set can be viewed on my Flickr…
Berlin-based sticker collections
I went to Berlin this past August to scan street art stickers from Infoladen Daneben and the Archiv der Jugendkulturen, contacts I made from my earlier trip to the city in May-June through a faculty research grant from the German Academic Exchange Service. I must have spent ten hours during the course of three days scanning stickers…. The first set of ~30 rare, original stickers from Infoladen Daneben dated back to the early 1990s and were all printed in black and red on yellow paper, though they didn’t have any sort of glue or adhesive on the back. They’re actually…
A Sticker A Day: Western History and Pop Culture through Street Art Stickers
I’ve got a new angle for my sticker book – to select 365 stickers and tell a story each day with a sticker. I worked on January today, and here below is what I have so far. Dates in bold mean I know of a sticker in my collection that could match the event. In some cases, there is more than one event, so I’ll have to choose later. Dates in italics mean I’ve already found the sticker image file to match the event. Ultimately, I’ll write a few paragraphs for each day/sticker of the year. A Sticker a Day:…
Kreuzberg stickers – tagging geo-tagged images with words
For my new geo-tagging project, I’m trying to come up with a manageable number of consistent subject terms to describe what a sticker is about, i.e., what people in library and information science call creating an authority control or set of keywords (index terms). One can go a little crazy in this endeavor, because there are so many comprehensive guides to refer to, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Getty Research Institute Art & Architecture Thesaurus, various ARTstor Subject Guides, and plain old common sense. My goal is to narrow it down to about 20 keywords, and…
Mapping right-wing stickers?
Yesterday while biking along the Rathausstraße, a popular restaurant and shopping area in Alexanderplatz, I came across several anti-Muslim stickers that are too offensive to post on Stickerkitty. I’ve been debating what to do and how to write about them in a neutral and ethical way. Posting offensive images can be a dangerous thing, I think, even if I were to simply describe what was going on in the stickers (i.e., what is being represented and/or communicated). The stickers were out in public and in plain view, but posting them online seems different. I’ll share a little of what could…
Geo-tagging in Berlin #2
Geo-tagging digital photographs is getting easier and more complicated. My new and evolving work flow goes like this. Rather than photograph any or every sticker that comes my way (it’s laborious to turn on/off the GPS settings every time, and I come across 100s of stickers a day, anyway), I’m learning to photograph stickers at a particular location and let that group of stickers tell the story. Yesterday, for example, I was walking along Torstraße in Prenzlauer Berg and came to a corner café with signs that read “BAIZ Bleibt!” (or “BAIZ remains”), a phrase I’d already seen on a…
Geo-tagging with Stickerkitty’s Map
I’m developing a geo-tagging component of my sticker project using the newly released Canon SX280 digital point-and-shoot camera with built in GPS. It’s not a very fancy camera at all, but there was a pretty steep learning curve at the beginning figuring out the GPS settings. Note: don’t bother with the wi-fi and/or smart phones. Thanks to Carole at work for figuring out the details! Today, I finally loaded my first image onto a Flickr map that reads right down to street level. I.e., Flickr can read the EXIF data (including the GPS coordinates) in an image file and then…