Pexels is an excellent website for free-to-use photos. On the website, anyone can find different kinds of photos for what they need. They include different categories like food, underwater, or backgrounds, so that anyone can find a photo of anything. Regarding the license, which can be found here and here, Pexels says that just about every photo is free to use and in the Public Domain. People can modify the photos, and attribution is not required. However, some of the photos fall under the Creative Commons license, and the use of those photos may still need permission from a third party.
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National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, located in Washington, D.C., is an excellent place for people to view different artwork. The museum contains artwork mostly from Western artists spanning different eras. The museum also provides resources for teachers to help plan lessons and field trips. Regarding the copyright, which you can find here, the museum says it has an Open Access policy. They state, “Users may download and reproduce . . . any digital image of a work in our collection that we believe is in the public domain.” Anyone can find this next to the artwork with the sentence, “This image is in the public domain.” It is also under the artwork with the Creative Commons Public Domain symbol.
Perlinger Archives
The Perlinger Archives, located on the Internet Archive on archive.org, and founded by Rick Prelinger, contains many different types of films in topics ranging from advertising, educational, and even wartime films. According to the website, their goal is “to collect preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven’t been collected elsewhere.” Regarding the copyright, which you can find here, the website makes a point to ensure the audience understands what can be copied or downloaded. The website tells the audience that, there is Public Domain material within the collection with a Creative Commons license for it.
NASA Commons Site on Flickr
The NASA Commons Site is a webpage created on Flickr’s image-sharing site to share “photographs, historic film and video” with a larger audience. As the website states, these materials come from the NASA archives and allow the “audience to help tell the story of these photos by adding tags, or key words, to the images to identify objects and people.” Since November 2009, they have gained a following of over twenty-six thousand people and have amassed over two hundred and fifty-one million views. According to the terms on Flickr, which you can find here, there are restrictions on what you can and cannot do to images posted on the website. This would mean that the photos on the NASA Commons Site would not fall under the Public Domain but are still under Creative Commons.
J Paul Getty Museum
The J. Paul Getty is a museum based in Los Angeles, California. They focus on conserving the arts for the public. The museum mostly has European artwork, but it varies in different styles of artwork. They include different kinds of sculptures, ornate manuscripts, photographs, and paintings, all from different eras in European history. The museum does include a rights statement. You can find the rights statement here. The museum states that they participate in an Open Content Program with their Public Domain artwork, meaning people do not need permission to download pictures of artwork that clearly state it is in the Public Domain.
A Definition of Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities is a field of study in which different disciplines work to analyze, archive, and preserve historical material in the digital medium.
There are many different reasons why I came to the definition I came up with. Digital Humanities, for one, crosses a vast amount of different disciplines in the field of history. Professors might work with archivists on a research project he or she is working on. A student might turn towards a librarian to find a book they are looking for. Along with the collaboration across different disciplines, there is also the use of the digital during that collaboration. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum explains, “The digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities.”1 This joining of the different disciplines and the digital medium is why I chose to include it in my definition.
The second part of my definition includes analyzing, archiving, and preserving historical material in the digital medium. Each one of these three activities are important in the realm of Digital Humanities. With the use of digital tools, new ways of analyzing open up new ways of looking at different materials. Those same materials can now also be archived differently thanks to Digital Humanities. The collecting, scanning, and cataloging of these materials makes them easily accessible. Not only that, but the preservation of these materials is achievable since digital items are much harder to destroy than physical.
- Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?”. ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 2, originally published in “Digital Humanities,” Wikipedia.