Description: Bloggers on The Bigger Picture often describe how, in the course of their work, they come across intriguing archival objects and artifacts that trigger new insights into history. “Hands on” encounters with compelling evidence from the past are thrilling and can be provocative. But so can different sorts of encounters, including those that are driven by data, rather than
Description: The Smithsonian Institution Archives will be celebrating African American History Month throughout February with a series of related posts on THE BIGGER PICTURE.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Salman Rushdie's archives, featured in an Emory University publication, by Georgia Popplewell, Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic."][/caption] Back in October I talked—with great interest and at length—with Anne Van Camp, director of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, about the various
Description: I was reading one of Holland Cotter’s reviews of an art exhibition in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, when I came across a description of a show that was about to close and wished I’d been able to see. At a space run by the Esopus Foundation, Bob Warner, a New York artist and optician, was opening, one box at a time, the cartons of material that another artist, Ray