Cephalophores galore!

St. Juthwara with her severed head, from the 15th century Sherborne Missal in the British Library

Cephalophores--saints who are beheaded and then tote their heads around afterward--are a favorite of one of the art historians I work with at the University of Denver.  He is quoted in this article from the website Atlas Obscura, The Decapitated Saints Who Still Managed to Hold Their Heads Up, by Sarah Lascow.

Scott Montgomery, a medieval art historian with an academic sideline in psychedelic rock posters, first started thinking about cephalophores when he was working on his dissertation on head reliquaries, the religious containers for the bones of saints. In the course of his research, he came across one very unique reliquary in which the saint is holding his head out, away from his body. He thought it was anomaly, until he kept finding more stories of headless saints.

The article mentions a number of cephalophores, including Saint Justus and Saint Denis.  A fun read and an interesting topic!

99% Invisible Podcasts

99% Invisible "is a tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world."

Created by Roman Mars, the podcasts are wide-ranging and interesting. The one that amused me particularly today is about the Billy Possum.

This is the tale of two toys with two very different fates. The Teddy Bear, named after the charismatic president Theodore Roosevelt, was a sensation in the early twentieth century. It even displaced baby dolls as the top toy in all of the United States, but no one thought it would last.  The burgeoning mass-market toy industry thought the bear was a novelty that would die out once Teddy Roosevelt left office in 1909. So the powers that be went on the search for the next cuddly companion that America’s children would adore. It was completely logical that they looked at the next president for inspiration, Roosevelt’s handpicked successor, William Howard Taft. In 1909, the toy makers of America placed their bets on the Taft presidency’s answer to the Teddy Bear: the Billy Possum.

Linked Open Data

This March I am presenting a case study at the 2015 VRA Conference here in Denver.  The presentation is called Using the Getty Vocabularies as Linked Open Data in a Cataloging Tool for an Academic Teaching Collection: Case Study at the University of Denver.  A paper addressing the same topic, written in collaboration with two librarians at the University of Denver, Sheila Yeh and Fernando Reyes, will be submitted to the VRA Bulletin for the Summer Issue.    

Abstract:

This case study examines the collaboration of two units at the University of Denver to create a new cataloging tool for the university’s teaching and learning object management system.  The Visual Media Director for the School of Art and Art History, the University Library’s Digital Infrastructure and Technology Coordinator, and the Library’s Senior Systems Analyst successfully developed the Art History Metadata Management System (MMS) in 2013.  The collaborators were able to harness the power of Linked Open Data (LOD) from vocabularies from the Getty Research Institute and the Library of Congress to facilitate the creation of metadata in MMS.  This case study examines LOD in the context of cataloging cultural objects using integrated controlled vocabularies to ensure metadata integrity. This study also demonstrates principles of agile software development that encourage frequent communication contributing to the success of a multi-departmental project.

The PowerPoint presentation will be posted on SlideShare after the conference, also.

I first learned about Linked Open Data (LOD) during a MOOC (Massive Open Online Class) on Coursera called Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information. LOD is really a fascinating phenomenon and one that is getting a lot of buzz.  Here is a great video about it by Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the internet and is now the Chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).