City scents on display

A cheerful presentation by Jason Logan at the New York Times of an olfactory tour of Manhattan. Much is asked of the viewer in this visual presentation to conjure the smells of New York. But, through the use of creative language that is artfully arrayed in spatial form, we can quite easily imagine the "scents of the city."

Time Magazine visual graphics on historical topics

For the last six years, Time Magazine has presented graphical representations of information on their magazine website. With a current catalog of 180 graphics, the Time collection is an interesting study in the evolution of web graphics.

The earliest of these graphics titled, "The Shuttle's Triumph and Tragedy," is simply a five panel time line presentation, with each panel containing an image and chronologically arranged summary information about the Space Shuttle Columbia.



the next four graphics were focused on the War in Iraq, a trend in military content that has continued to this day.

This graphic from 2004 is also a time line, but is interestingly static. Although the information is arrayed nicely on the time line, the graphic lacks an interactivity, something we may now come to expect from online graphic.



This 2005 graphic on the Civil War military leadership in the Union Army featured an enhanced level of interactivity across four screens and within screens on roll-over effects and pop-up graphics.




Two Time graphics attempt to represent historical spaces in Monticello and Jamestown.








A more recent 2009 graphic on FDR's war-related actions is decidedly flat in terms of information array and intereactivity. Hopefully, this will not prove to be a new trend at Time.



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History paintings online: Visual presentation and reading the past

An amazing array of visual artistic content is available on the Web. in this post I look at online representations of Benjamin West's paintings, specifically his history paintings.

A good starting place is Wikimedia Common. This resource includes copyright and royalty free images. An entry on Benjamin West includes (as of this posting) 25 images of his work.


Included in the collection is West's famous 1781 unfinished painting "American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Agreement with Great Britain." Wikimedia Commons also include a category titled History Painting with numerous additional paintings in the genre.


A Google Image search will also yield a nice array of images from a search on Benjamin West. A relatively new feature in Google Images also allows you to search for similar images. This may be helpful if you are trying to find an appropriately sized or shaped image or if you want variations on an image theme.



Here are four images that came up in a Google similar images search on this initial image














The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History from the Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a wide range of essays with accompanying images on a wide range of art topics. An essay on Benjamin West titled Students of Benjamin West (1738–1820) explores the influence of West on American art.



Luna Commons is an online browser that provides access to thousands of art images. A search on Benjamin West yields 27 relevant images of paintings. What makes the resources so valuable are a collection of tools that enable users to export the images in a number of ways including as an embeddable widget (using iframes, unfortunately not supported by Blogger) as well as one click download of the images and export to Powerpoint (embedded using SlideShare below).

Benjamin West

View more presentations from jk1lee.

This graphic, published May 22, 2009 in the Wall Street Journal to accompany a story titled Changing the Art on the White House Walls, illustrates the history of art in the White House


For more on art, portraits, and presidents see my post of Capturing Presidential History.

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