The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has provided a $321,000, one-year grant to fund the digitizing of 10,000 photographs of Asian artifacts housed at The Ohio State University, making them more accessible to scholars, students and the public.
The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art, located in Hayes Hall, holds over 300,000 slides and photographs of art and architecture. Susan Huntington, dean of Ohio State’s Graduate School and Distinguished University professor of art history, and John Huntington, professor of art history, took the photographs.
The photos have been collected over a span of 30 years, and John Huntington said the art ranges from ancient to modern, with the oldest pieces dating back to the Harappan civilization around 2000 B.C.
He said he has photographed artifacts throughout Asia, collecting from countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, China, and Japan. A majority of the archive is comprised of art from India.
“The majority of the material is rock-cut architecture, which is an excavated building,” Huntington said.
Rock-cut architecture is not the only form of art in this extensive collection. It has numerous photos of free standing sculptures and cave paintings as well, he said.
Jan Glowski, curator of the Huntington Archive, said the staff scans about 200 images per day in order to complete the 10,000 needed for the Mellon Foundation, and to eventually digitize all 300,000 photos.
She said this technology is very important and helpful in making research and teaching easier.
“Digital technology gives you the ability and flexibility to examine what was once in a slide in great detail,” Glowski said. “Rather than seeing just that picture on the wall, you will be able to zoom in and see a specific portion of the piece.”
Once the images are scanned, they go through a process of color correction due to the age of some of the photos, and are then individually catalogued into the database, she said.
With an electronic database, one can set specific parameters in a search within certain contexts, said Huntington.
“For example, I could say ‘give me images of a standing Buddha between the years 480 and 580, from all across Asia’ and it would be a fantastic tool for comparative analysis,” he said. “That is just a simple search, it can be much more complex if you were so inclined to do so.”
The images from the Huntington Archive will be included in the Mellon Foundation’s recently launched ArtSTOR, Huntington said. ArtSTOR allows for the study and teaching of works of art by connecting to their server, he said.
“I was delighted to learn about the grant,” he said. “We want to put up all 300,000 of our photographs on our own servers and this also gives a good start on our own process.”
Digitizing the photos has become an important task in teaching people about Asian culture and traditions.
“There is a great deal of importance to the study of Asian art because we learn to understand both the history of people and places in a much larger context than just isolated stories in history books, we get to see an attested document of the people at the time and place where the image was made,” Huntington said.
He said it gives people a greater sense of the history of mankind, and is very significant to the American public because the fastest growing segment in the American population is Asians.
“We are the biggest mixing pot in the world, and I love it,” he said. “It helps to know about each other.”
