Metadata: the core of the debate

 23-02-2024 14:15 - 15:45 GMT+1 || Join us on Zoom|| Back to the programme

Historiographic Approaches to Digitization of Art

Author:

Anna Naslund - Stockholm University

Abstract

In this presentation I will discuss how the processes of digitization of art historical collections and materials can be studied from a historiographic perspective. I will present possible sources, methods and results when one chooses to study digitization from, the within art history common, historiographic angle. The cases come from a number of studies we have performed within two recent research projects on metadata cultures. As can be seen from these cases there is a great variety in how analogue art works have been digitized. Not only have the digital representations of art varied over time, but these differences can be linked to different institutional, historical attitudes and priorities.

Bio

Anna Näslund is a professor of art history at Stockholm University. She has written extensively on various aspects of photography and visual culture, the digital turn, archives, and museum practices. She has been PI of the projects The Politics of Metadata and Sharing the Visual Heritage 2019-2023 [metadataculture.se] which focused on different aspects of cultural heritage institutions image collections online. Since 2024 she is editor of Digital Culture & Society. Recent publications include Travelling Images. Looking Across the Borderlands of Art, Media and Visual Culture (2018), Fotografihistorier. Fotografi och bildbruk i Sverige från 1839 till idag (2022), and the forthcoming co-edited anthology Critical Digital Art History (2024).

Quantitative art historical inquiries on semantic data: reflections on the Iconology Dataset

Author:

Sofia Baroncini — Postdoc, IEG Mainz, Leibniz Institute of European History, and University of Bologna

Abstract

This presentation focuses on the challenges and potentials of applying the semantic web to iconography and iconology, a branch of art history focusing on the study of artwork’s subject and meaning. To address the topic, a case study is presented, in which a selection of claims by the art historian Erwin Panofsky is expressed in an RDF dataset, for which an ontology for iconographical and iconological statements was created. The resulting Iconology Dataset is manually curated, featuring descriptions of approximately 400 artworks, mainly from Medieval and Renaissance Western Art. We will address how the availability of authoritative, structured data can have significant benefits for information retrieval and both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Nevertheless, the approach has some drawbacks, as the creation of authoritative, reliable, and error-free data is labor-intensive and prone to the data collector’s interpretation and decisions.

Bio

Sofia Baroncini graduated in Visual Arts from the University of Bologna with a Master’s thesis on Iconological aspects in Ontology design. She is a PhD candidate in Digital Humanities in the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna (Italy). She recently started a Postdoc in Digital Humanities at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz (Germany). Her research interests are in knowledge organization and computational methods applied to Arts, with a focus on iconography and iconology studies.