David Francis @introvertdev

I provide technical support for various digital initiatives for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Arctic Museum, and the Bowdoin Library's Special Collections. Additionally I provide support for faculty projects. At Bowdoin, I have had the opportunity to use all the skills I have learned to develop a variety of applications and, of course, learn about all the many haunted aspects of this fine institution!

Noteable Projects

• Digital Ricoeur. (Fernando Nascimento) The Digital Ricoeur website provides access to the work of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005). A rich full-text search of a growing number of Ricoeur's works, as well as a complete listing of his works as a searchable bibliography.
• e-Packets for Bowdoin Classes. (Bowdoin Museum of Art) In the face of remote learning, we expanded the ability of faculty to share selections of the Bowdoin Museum of Art's collections by creating ePackets. They are curated by faculty and BCMA staff for specific classes and provide additional images and data associated with art objects that exist the BCMA databases. In addition to basic object information, you can explore exhibition histories, scholarly commentaries, and previous object labels. When available the ePackets also provide associated image inspection tools, 360 rotation views, 3D models, and videos. ePackets uses a combination of many interesting technologies to promote a rich remote viewing experience. Built on an EmbARK Web Kiosk system, it is enhanced with IIIF, XML, Javascript, and HTML5.
• Assyria to America: A Digital Exploration. (Bowdoin Museum of Art) In addition to exploring the ancient and modern histories of the Assyrian reliefs at Bowdoin, the exhibition Assyria to America, launched in 2019, showcases a variety of new digital approaches to the study of ancient art that the BCMA staff have been deploying across the collections. Some technologies showcased include: International Image Interoperability Framework, polychromy, Reflectance Transformation Imaging, and 3D modeling.
• Kinolab. (Allison Cooper) Kinolab's aim is to be the richest, most comprehensive collection of film and series clips available for non-commercial use in the United States, built from the ground up by the students and scholars using it. Kinolab is built on LAMP technology specially designed for the digital analysis of moving images.
• Cratylus: The Art Tagging Toolset. (Bowdoin Museum of Art) Cratylus is a mobile application that gamifies the tagging of works in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art which will make our collections more searchable and accessible.
• Media Trades. (Daniel F. Stone) Media Trades is an application for helping people break out of their "echo chambers." Many people seem to get their news from like-minded sources nowadays. Left-leaning people get news from sources that lean left and right-leaning people from right-leaning sources. So, for many people, the news just echoes what they already believe. Media Trades allows people trade stories from opposite sides of the political spectrum.
• A Resounding Beat: Music in the Inuit World. I helped the Arctic Museum set up a number of listening devices for their exhibit which included two workstations that allowed visitors to sample music from an easy to navigate playlist.
• New Views of the Middle Ages: Highlights from the Wyvern Collection. This digital exhibition presents the work of Kathryn Gerry, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History. Critical research has been contributed by members of Professor Gerry’s Fall 2019 seminar, ARTH 3370, Medieval Art and the Modern Viewer: Building an Exhibition with the Wyvern Collection.
• Fast Fashion / Slow Art. This digital exhibition complements a gallery exhibition that was on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art from January 30, 2020 to August 2, 2020 and at George Washington University from August 8, 2019 to December 15, 2019. It features various multimedia works presented at the original exhibition and includes commentary and discussion from artists.
• Maine’s Lithographic Landscapes: Town & City Views, 1830-1870. This digital catalog was released at the time of the Maine’s Lithographic Landscapes exhibition at the BCMA. This online resource makes use of IIIF images allowing visitors to zoom in on the fine details of the lithographs featured. Additionally, a map-based view allows visitors to see the objects in terms of Maine's geography.
• Perspectives from Postwar Hiroshima Chuzo Tamotzu, Children’s Drawings, and the Art of Resolution. In 1953, a Japanese-American artist by the name of Chuzo Tamotzu facilitated an exchange of children’s art between Hiroshima, Japan, and Tamotzu’s home of Santa Fe, New Mexico. This exchange brought a new perspective to both cities, expanding international dialogue around identity, reconciliation and peace. Included with the works are interviews with the now-grown child artists.
• A Handheld History: Five Centuries of Medals from the Molinari Collection at Bowdoin College. This online catalog provides a view of the BCMA's Molinari Collection. For the 2018 exhibition of the same name, we also created a mobile-based Web application that visitors could bring with them into the museum do a deeper dive into the material. Making use of QR codes, visitors could pull up extra commentary as well as IIIF-enabled images. A Handheld History on Your Handheld Device
• Second Sight. We built our own low-cost listening devices for this very audio-heavy exhibition. Details about these audio devices including schematics for building are available.

Recent Conferences & Workshops

• Demonstration: Opening Speaker, Women in Technology: Project FutureScape & AI with Holly Sherburne. Bowdoin Colege. September 23, 2024
• Demonstration: Cratylus: Crowd-sourced Tagging to Enhance Discoverability, April 5, 2021. MuseWeb 2021 (online)
• From the Northwest Palace to the Northeast US. A workshop on Assyrian reliefs in New England and New York. May 17-18, 2019 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick Maine
• Demonstration: Expanding Access to Non-Sighted Visitors: An Innovative and Easy-to-Build Audio Device for Any Museum, MuseWeb 2019, Boston, MA. Schematics and How-tos