When you think of art and archives, protest signs don’t often come to mind. Fortunately, many of the signs from Boston’s first Women’s March in 2017 have been saved and now available to the public not in poster form but as a searchable digital archive. The Northeastern professors serve as the primary reason. This interesting information came to us from Northeastern University in their article, “Digital Archive Preserves Groundbreaking Moment in Civic Activism.”
Three College of Arts, Media and Design professors and friends saved the left behind signs and plan to release a series of visualizations and a public application programming interface so that others can work with the images and the metadata they created.
“It was a snapshot of this place and time,” said assistant professor Dietmar Offenhuber, who holds joint appointments in the Department of Art + Design and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, one that he and his colleagues, experts in information design and visual communication, couldn’t ignore.
The unveiling of the archive coincided with the second Women’s March in 2018.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
