Brazil Comes Alive

There were two main objectives carried out by the image selection and analysis team. The first was to select images from the John Carter Brown Archive of Early American Images that corresponded to important tropes within the Skidmore text, and the second was explore ways to make the chosen images accessible to non-academic and undergraduate audiences. This second consideration was especially important during the process as we considered that few people in the general public have contact with the John Carter Brown Library, a shame given the historical value of the JCB’s collection. Since the average website visitor does not have time to pour over images in detail as we did, we chose to highlight areas of great significance in Brazilian history and areas that users might be highly interested in. Though not yet complete, our eventual goal is to erase these boxes and place small ‘hotspots’ in their place. The hotspots, when moused over, will allow users to zoom into the regions that currently have boxes around them. This will allow users to access the details of these rich images and hopefully spark further interest and inquiry into Brazilian history. The first few examples below provide a low-tech sample of what we hope to develop into an interesting and attractive way of interacting with these historical images.

The red boxes in the above image indicate "hotspot" areas. Below are the hotspot areas in greater detail:

©John Carter Brown Library, Archive of Early American Images ID: 4840002

Below are the hotspot areas in greater detail:

©John Carter Brown Library, Archive of Early American Images ID: 7780001

Below are the hotspot areas in greater detail:

©John Carter Brown Library, Archive of Early American Images ID: 230091

From this point on, we simply present the large-scale images with their hotspot areas indicated with boxes, but without the hotspot images in greater detail.