The Global Image Gallery project began as an affordability and inclusivity effort. Faculty sought to replace a costly and Eurocentric art history textbook used across the LIberal Studies Program’s required three-semester Arts and Cultures sequence with a data set that not only reflected the global focus of the program but also gave students and faculty the ability to fashion their own narratives and meanings with the images and metadata it contained. The resulting site, the Liberal Studies Global Image Gallery, went into use for all first year courses in the fall semester of 2019 and now serves all 2500 LS first and second year students. In addition to having access to the image gallery itself, students and faculty also have access to a copy of the data set itself, allowing them to fashion timelines, exhibits, and other digital forms as products of personal or class research projects.
The Global Image Gallery consists of a dataset stored in Google Sheets, images (currently stored in Google Drive but slated to move to an IIIF server), and a WordPress site into which content is delivered from the dataset via a customized CSV uploader. The gallery currently includes 1113 unique posts with more added on an ongoing basis.
