At first glance you might think the image above is a finely engraved portrait. Not quite! The detailed likeness of French inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard was actually woven from delicate strands of silk using a programmable loom. CHF fellow Benjamin Gross explains how this stunning portrait, recently added to CHF's collections, is an elegant embodiment of a data-driven future. Read the article
Did you know it can take an archivist more than two hours to photograph, edit, upload, and create metadata for a single document? With more than 120 boxes of material in the Beckman Historical Collection alone (and some of those boxes containing more than 100 folders), those hours can really add up. Follow the journey of just one document from storage to digitization in this time-lapse video. Watch the video
Art and chemistry overlap in the work of Bay Area artist Zea Morvitz. The recipient of a CHF travel grant, Morvitz spent a week doing research in our collections to fuel An Alchemical Emblem Book, her newly released collection of ballpoint-pen drawings and poems inspired by early modern alchemical illustrations. She recently returned to CHF to give the Othmer Library a copy of her book and sat down with us to talk alchemy, research, and art. Read the interview
Take a peek into our latest exhibition with a Science at Play animated short! We've illustrated several first-person stories of childhood experiments, exciting discoveries, and moments of inspiration. In this video Michelle Francl, a professor of chemistry at Bryn Mawr College, shares her earliest memories of fun (and danger) with chemistry play. Hear her story
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