SmArt

Met the creators of a lovely online (western) art history site yesterday - designed to replace the unwieldy, inexpensive and unengaging textbooks students usually have to lug around. Incorporating video, viewer pictures, and unscripted commentary, it's a beaut, and succeeds, I think, in its aim of making the art feel real and relevant to digital natives. Next on their agenda are nonwestern traditions - they're looking for contributors - but they're also offering the lovely design of their site to people who might want to do the same for another subject... I I'll wait to see how the solve the chronology problem with nonwestern traditions, but what they have so far is so neat they might just find a way to do it justice.