On September 16, HSP will host an event to premier Politics in Graphic Detail:  Exploring History through Political Cartoons.  Over the course of the last two years, HSP has been working on this project, funded by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission's (NHPRC) Innovation in Archives and Documentary Editing program, intended to improve the image viewer that displays digitized materials from our collections.  This project, known as "Historic Images, New Technologies," officially comes to an end on August 31 and the Politics in Graphic Detail launches online on September 1.  Our aim was to enhance discoverability and description of collection items, particularly of graphic materials, and engender content-sharing and linking among fellow institutions and scholars.  Politics in Graphic Detail, the result of our efforts, will feature the newly improved image viewer, along with annotated political cartoons from our archive. Please join us as project staff will discuss and demonstrate the features of the new site. This will be followed by a document display featuring political cartoons, including an original Thomas Nast artwork, “The Silence of Matt Quay,” and a reception.

Project Details: Politics in Graphic Detail is an innovative digital exhibit that features more than 100 political cartoons from the mid-1700s through 1923.  Each cartoon was annotated using XML according to Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) P5 guidelines to highlight notable features. Politics in Graphic Detail is intended to show off HSP’s renovated image viewer tool and its new capabilities, including staff-created "zones" on each image featuring transcriptions and annotations that contain more information about what the cartoon depicts.  The new viewer also offers improved panning, zooming, and rotating of images, which enhance the user's ability to interact with an image at the detail level.  Additional Politics in Graphic Detail site content includes extensive educational resources for teachers and students, as well as scholarly essays by political cartoon historians Allan Holtz and Richard Samuel West.