In next week's Art History discussion sections, we are going over a lot of terminology from sculpture and architecture (relief, pediment, peristyle, doric, ionic, triglyph, metope, etc.).
In a moment of true art history geekdom, I wanted to make the point that we are going to "vocabulary land" and thus searched out sites that created word clouds. I stumbled across wordle.net and proceeded to input all of the classical architecture terms from wikipedia.
Excited, I then took all of the text from Bruce's new website under the news section (be sure to check it out) and inputted them into wordle. Above is what it came up with. Bruce astutely pointed out that it looks vaguely like a map of the US. This site is a blast! You can change the orientation, font, colors, etc. I encourage you to visit wordle.net and create your own!
Not that I am actually walking from the PRC to the BU Art History department, but above represents my "move" if you will and a big life transition from working fulltime to going to graduate school fulltime: 0.3 miles. I am currently parking in Cambridge to save money and walking over the BU bridge with laptop and books. Luckily, I have a little office cubicle, which is proving quickly to be a life (and back) saver and I don't have to find a new grocery store. I always wanted to go back for my PhD, it just took me a while. I am loving it.
Updates will be fewer and farther between as the reading and prep work takes over... But in short, I had my first 1/2 week of classes, including a seminar on representations of Paris. I will also be taking a seminar on Material Culture. I am a teaching fellow and will be leading 3 discussion sections in support of Art History 111 (ancient to medieval) with about 20 students in each. I just finished preparing my section powerpoint, we're looking at the Venus of Willendorf, Palette of King Narmer, Standard of Ur, and the Alexander Mosaic and comparing them with some later works to get them used to looking and describing what they see in words. I had a blast putting it together.
Two years ago, Bruce was preparing for graduate school, see this post for example, and now I am. He starts teaching fulltime at the New England Institute of Art this fall and is also teaching a section of View Camera at RISD. Wish us both luck!
