Internet Archive Book Images Now Available via Flickr Commons
Image from page 274 of Comte de Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, greques et romaines (Paris : Desaint & Saillant, 1752). More information is available here»
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As noted here at Enfilade in December, the British Library made available over a million images from the pages of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books via Flickr Commons. The BBC now reports that Georgetown University Fellow in Residence Kalev Leetaru has uploaded 2.6 million pictures sourced from books digitized by the Internet Archive. Publication dates range from 1500 to 1922. All images are tagged and available for free download. A quick search for Caylus turned up the image shown above. Search options are limited, and it took me a few moments just to work out how to search only within the Internet Archive Book Images, as opposed to all of Flickr (proof only of my own clumsiness; once you start typing in the main search box in the upper right hand corner, you should see a photostream option appear just below). How useful this resource is will depend upon what sort of search you’re attempting, but the possibilities seem extraordinary. In addition to the news story excerpted below, the Flickr Blog provides further information. –CH
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Leo Kelion, “Millions of Historic Images Posted to Flickr,” BBC News (29 August 2014).
An American academic is creating a searchable database of 12 million historic copyright-free images.
Kalev Leetaru has already uploaded 2.6 million pictures to Flickr, which are searchable thanks to tags that have been automatically added. The photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organisation. The images have been difficult to access until now. Mr Leetaru said digitisation projects had so far focused on words and ignored pictures.
“For all these years all the libraries have been digitising their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works,” he told the BBC. “They have been focusing on the books as a collection of words. This inverts that. . . .”
The full BBC story is available here»
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More about the Internet Archive, from the Wikipedia entry on the organization:
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge.”[2][3] It provides permanent storage of and free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books. As of October 2012, its collection topped 10 petabytes.[4][5] In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet. . .
N O T E S
2. “Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions.” Internet Archive. Retrieved April 13, 2013.
3. “Internet Archive: Universal Access to all Knowledge.” Internet Archive. Retrieved April 13, 2013.
4. “10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes archived!” Internet Archive Blogs. October 26, 2012. “On Thursday, 25 October, hundreds of Internet Archive supporters, volunteers, and staff celebrated addition of the 10,000,000,000,000,000th byte to the Archive’s massive collections.”
5. Brown, A. (2006). Archiving Websites: A Practical Guide for Information Management Professionals. London: Facet Publishing. p. 9.
New Book | Geometrical Objects
From Susan Klaiber’s blog (14 August 2014) . . .
What began as a small session at the Society of Architectural Historians 2005 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, and then developed into a very collegial two-day conference in Oxford in 2007, has now been published by Springer in both hardcover and e-book formats.
Anthony Gerbino, ed., Geometrical Objects: Architecture and the Mathematical Sciences, 1400–1800 Archimedes 38 (Cham: Springer, 2014), 318 pages, ISBN: 978-3319059976, $180.
This volume explores the mathematical character of architectural practice in diverse pre- and early modern contexts. It takes an explicitly interdisciplinary approach, which unites scholarship in early modern architecture with recent work in the history of science, in particular, on the role of practice in the scientific revolution. As a contribution to architectural history, the volume contextualizes design and construction in terms of contemporary mathematical knowledge, attendant forms of mathematical practice, and relevant social distinctions between the mathematical professions. As a contribution to the history of science, the volume presents a series of micro-historical studies that highlight issues of process, materiality, and knowledge production in specific, situated, practical contexts. Our approach sees the designer’s studio, the stone-yard, the drawing floor, and construction site not merely as places where the architectural object takes shape, but where mathematical knowledge itself is deployed, exchanged, and amplified among various participants in the building process.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction by Anthony Gerbino
Part I: Foundations
Bernard Cache, ‘Proportion and Continuous Variation in Vitruvius’s De Architectura’
Part II: Mathematics and Material Culture in Italian Renaissance Architecture
Francesco Benelli, ‘The Palazzo Del Podestà in Bologna: Precision and Tolerance in a Building all’Antica‘
Ann C. Huppert, ‘Practical Mathematics in the Drawings of Baldassarre Peruzzi and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger’
David Friedman, ‘Geometric Survey and Urban Design: A Project for the Rome of Paul IV (1555–1559)’
Part III: The Baroque Institutional Context
Susan Klaiber, ‘Architecture and Mathematics in Early Modern Religious Orders’
Kirsti Andersen, ‘The Master of Painted Architecture: Andrea Pozzo, S. J. and His Treatise on Perspective’
Part IV: Narratives for the Birth of Structural Mechanics
Jacques Heyman, ‘Geometry, Mechanics, and Analysis in Architecture’
Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, ‘Epistemological Obstacles to the Analysis of Structures: Giovanni Bottari’s Aversion to a Mathematical Assessment of Saint-Peter’s Dome (1743)’
Filippo Camerota, ‘Scientific Concepts of Beauty in Architecture: Vitruvius Meets Descartes, Galileo, and Newton’
Part V: Architecture and Mathematical Practice in the Enlightenment
Jeanne Kisacky, ‘Breathing Room: Calculating an Architecture of Air’
David Yeomans, Jason M. Kelly, and Frank Salmon, ‘James “Athenian” Stuart and the Geometry of Setting Out’
Index
Enfilade 
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