CAA News Today

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Rhizome Releases First Public Version of Webrecorder

Current digital preservation solutions involve complex, automated processes that were designed for a web made from relatively static documents. Webrecorder, in contrast, can capture social media and other dynamic content, such as embedded video and complex JavaScript, while putting the user at the center of the archiving process. (Read more from Rhizome.)

Does Technological Analysis Destroy the Romance of Art History?

In 2012, a linguist at the University of Southern California decoded a famous medieval manuscript written in a cypher with software designed to translate remote languages and based on algorithms that matched the frequency of unknown sounds with the frequency of word-use in known tongues. Meanwhile, archaeologists use satellite photographs to identify unexcavated sites in Egypt and map terrorist looting in the Middle East. (Read more from Aeon.)

Black Art Incubator Aims to Invert Art-World Normal

The Black Art Incubator takes blackness—and everything this racial identifier suggests about what a person might know or feel—as a given. The project isn’t so much oppositional as an inversion of what we tend to expect. “Most art institutions are rooted in whiteness, but it’s implied, it’s this normalized thing,” Kim Drew says. With the project, “we’re normalizing being rooted in blackness without beating people over the head with it.” (Read more from the Village Voice.)

What Artists Need to Understand about Privacy

Artists regularly include identifiable figures in their work, and calling this work “art” won’t always suffice to keep them out of trouble. Artists aren’t being hauled into court every time they include a recognizable face in their work, but the growing sense that one’s likeness is a “property” that can be commercially exploited has led many artists to feel less secure in pursuing realistic figurative images. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

Five Strategies Successful Artists Follow to Thrive in Their Careers

As a gallery owner, I’ve been particularly interested in watching the careers of artists who have built strong sales of their work. These artists are able to generate sales that allow them to devote all of their time to their art. They have found ways to make a successful living while at the same time pursuing their passion. (Read more from Red Dot Blog.)

The Unintended Consequences of Seeking Tenure

Originally established to protect scholars from reprisals for advancing new ideas in research or in the classroom, tenure now comes under regular fire for limiting how quickly institutions can respond to change in the short term and for tying up budgets in the long term. Another important yet unintended consequence receives comparatively little discussion: the limitations that the pursuit of tenure has on the contributions assistant professors can make to their own institutions. (Read more from Vitae.)

Stress and Student Success

I’ve spent a decade teaching college success strategies to mostly nontraditional first-year students. At times I would stare at my course roster, hoping that an answer to the success riddle would appear. “Why do you leave?” I’d ask. “What else can I do to help you?” While I use countless teaching strategies in my courses, I’ve been tracking something more fundamental: a unified field theory for student success in higher education. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Hands Off My Smiley Face: Emoji Become Corporate Tools

Apple’s new emoji feature seems more likely to impede a different kind of skill: creating surprising, figurative, and subversive forms of individual expression from the digital ephemera that populate our devices. In a rush to harness the power of the web’s most evocative cultural units—emoji and their hyperactive cousins, GIFs—tech companies, corporate brands, and social-media stars could inadvertently risk flattening the creative world that’s sprung up around them. (Read more from the New York Times.)