VRC staff can provide skills-based workshops and instructional sessions for your students as part of a course. These workshops include active-learning components, encourage students to participate and discuss, and are easily customizable. We can tailor these workshops to specific assignments, especially digital exhibitions. If there is an instructional topic that isn’t outlined here, please get in touch with staff to create a session specific to a course. To schedule a workshop, please write to visualresources@uchicago.edu.
Menu of Workshops
Visual Literacy
In this workshop, VRC staff discuss image research and LUNA digital collections with students through a critical visual literacy lens. We begin with discussing their image needs, de-mystify the digital collections creation process and discuss how that impacts end-user image research. Questions that emerge include: How would you describe an image? How does the digital collection describe the image? Where is there overlap, where is there disconnect? We cover digital image quality, color fidelity, and some basics of image editing. We also include case studies of recent undergraduate/MAPH/PhD student users who have collaborated with the VRC, with case studies selected by the course level.
Recommended Audience: BA students (Junior or Senior Seminar); MAPH students, and PhD students.
View examples of slides from workshops for Art History: African Art, Art History: Junior Seminar for BA Thesis, and Art History: Earthworks Revisited.
Personal Image and PDF Management
In this workshop, VRC staff discuss why students might want to pursue creating and maintaining an archive of their personal research images. We introduce several freely available platforms, OCR of PDFs, discuss the pros and cons, and help students align their usage needs with the right platform for them. We also discuss best practices for file naming conventions, image description and metadata, and a basic introduction to image copyright
Recommended Audience: BA thesis writers, MAPH students, and PhD students.
Image Copyright for Theses, Dissertations, or other Publications
In this workshop, VRC staff cover image copyright and publication issues in-depth, discuss best practices for fair use, and how to manage all of the data and permissions associated with the project. See Images for Dissertation and Images for Publication for more details
This workshop could be paired or combined with the Personal Image Management workshop.
Recommended Audience: Students writing articles, dissertations, or other documents they intend to publish.
Other Instructional Session Options
- Digital Image Editing (Photoshop, Lightroom, Adobe)
- Digital Exhibitions
- Digitizing Work for Portfolios
- Developing effective slides for art historical presentations
Visual Resources Professional Standards
The VRC adheres to the following professional standards:
- ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education
- ACRL Framework for Information Literacy
- ARLIS/NA Graphic Design, Interior Design, Photography, Urban and Regional Planning Information Competencies
- Fair Use: Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, College Art Association