Luke Leither is the Art & Architecture Librarian at the J Willard Marriott Library. His research interests include the life and work of Feliks Topolski, the material research and selection methods of architects, and ephemeral art and architecture. A selected list of Luke’s publications and conference papers can be found here: https://bit.ly/3FatEvR.

Project Description:Revealing Topolski’s Chronicle will make a unique set of the library’ collection more accessible to users. Topolski’s Chronicle is a series of broadsheets created by the artist Feliks Topolski and was distributed bimonthly to subscribers from 1953 through 1982. The Marriott Library subscribed to the Chronicle and has preserved it in the Fine Arts & Architecture Collection to this day. Visual resources like the Chronicle are often overlooked as sources by academics engaged in humanities and social science research. Perhaps the most obvious and difficult-to-address reason for this is the challenge of searching library catalogs, databases, and other indexes for visual content related to a specific topic. We will address some of these problems by digitizing and analyzing the Chronicle. Name and object recognition will be applied to scanned text and, using current data visualization techniques, we will use the extracted data to make this resource more accessible. With these steps we hope to bring Topolski’s work off the shelves and into user’s research and imagination.