Please note: this program will be held virtually on Zoom. Please register for free in advance here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introducing-postcard-tag-tickets-104142679558

Postcards can tell us a lot about how previous generations perceived and experienced the world. As the historical value of postcards becomes more and more apparent, scholars and enthusiasts are analyzing them to make new discoveries about the past.

In this virtual program, you’ll learn from scholars and Newberry staff about “Postcard Tag,” a crowdsourcing initiative to improve the digital accessibility of thousands of historic postcards from the Newberry’s collection.

Join us for this free info session, and then start digging into the trove of postcard images available in the Newberry’s digital collections.

List of Speakers:

Samantha Blickhan is IMLS Postdoctoral Fellow & Humanities Lead with the digital crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse. She completed her undergraduate education at the University of Iowa, where she studied Medieval English Literature and classical Voice Performance. She holds an MA in musicology from Oxford University and a PhD in musicology from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Jen Wolfe is the Digital Initiatives Manager at the Newberry. She has presented on digital public history, cultural heritage crowdsourcing, and digital pedagogy at conferences including the Midwest Archives Conference, Women’s History in a Digital World, Penn Digital Humanities Forum Symposium, DLF Forum, and Museums and the Web. In 2013, she won the Center for Research Libraries Primary Source Award for Access.

Will Hansen is the Newberry’s Director of Reader Services and Curator of Americana. He manages the Department of Reader Services, which serves researchers at the reference desks, in the reading rooms, and outside the Newberry’s walls via email and other communications, while also managing the library’s collections in the 10-floor book stack building. As Curator of Americana, he collects current monographs, antiquarian books, and manuscript Americana for the Newberry. He also facilitates and conducts bibliographic instruction, tours and orientations for visiting groups, classes, and fellows. He holds an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Ellen Handy is an associate professor of art history at the City University of New York and a historian, curator, and critic of photography and modern art. She teachers courses in the history of photography, the art of the United States, art criticism, and research methods in art history. Previously, she was Executive Curator of Visual Collections at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, Senior Research Assistant in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a regular columnist for Arts Magazine. Her research interests include landscape and urban imagery in photography and other mediums, intersections of art and science in 19th century photography, women and photography, connoisseurship in photography, printed ephemera, and early modernism in visual and literary culture in the United States. She received her PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and her BA from Barnard College of Columbia University.

This program will be held virtually on Zoom. Please register for free in advance here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introducing-postcard-tag-tickets-104142679558

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Tags: Chicago, Ellen Handy, Introducing "Postcard Tag", Jen Wolfe, Near North Side, Newberry Library, Samantha Blickhan, Will Hansen