DMVI Iconclass mapping

This post was supplied by Etienne Posthumus, member of the Arkyves project.

The Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration contains records and images of 868 literary illustrations that were published in or around 1862, providing bibliographical and iconographical details, as well as the ability for users to view images at exceptionally high quality.

The project has an extensive iconographic classification, allowing fine-grained browsing and searching capabilities. The iconographic taxonomy used was tailor made to fit the purposes of the project, and is immensely useful for the study of Victorian culture.

Due to the fact that the iconographic description was done systematically, it is possible to ‘map’ the system used by DMVI to other classification systems. One of the widely used Iconographical systems used internationally is Iconclass. One of the benefits of performing such a mapping is that the Iconclass system is widely used internationally, and has become a de facto standard for subject classification. The other more interesting benefit to the DMVI project is the fact that Iconclass is mulit-lingual, with the textual descriptions available in English, German, French and Italian with other language versions in progress.

In the last quarter of 2010 a project was started to map the DMVI classification to Iconclass by the members of the Arkyves project. The mapping has been completed, and the contents of DMVI can now also be searched and browsed iconographically in German, French and Italian in addition to the existing English version. The contents of DMVI can also be studied in a wider context of art & illustration, by seeing similar images and text from other collections for the same iconographical concept.

DMVI Iconclass mapping can be viewed here.

The Iconclass mapping will be integrated with the DMVI project as part of the ongoing enhancement project.

Enhancing DMVI news

A few updates on the status of the Enhancing DMVI project:

Members of the project team will attend a digital humanities workshop at the University of Bristol on 23 February 2011. The idea is to try and build up a network of academics working in interrelated fields, and to showcase some of the projects and resources that are available at Bristol, Cardiff, and beyond.

Enhancing DMVI’s Social Networking Workshop will take place at Cardiff University on Thursday 17 March 2011, in Room WX3.07/3.14 of the Queen’s Building, The Parade. The aim of this day-long session is to explore both the theory and practice of using a social networking approach to tagging and analysing images.

A prototype social networking application, allowing Facebook users to tag and comment on images from the database, is currently in the early stages of development.

The ICONCLASS mapping, which is being carried out by image database consultants Etienne Posthumus and Hans Brandhorst, is nearing completion. In this phase of the project, the ICONCLASS classification system, which is used by art curation systems throughout the world, has been mapped on to DMVI’s internal metadata system. The addition of ICONCLASS will offer new ways to interrogate and organise the data, and will allow DMVI to be searched in multiple languages.

More soon.

DMVI: Workshop 1 summary

On Wednesday 15 December, just before we all departed for the Christmas break, we held the first of our DMVI/DEDEFI  Workshops on ‘Planning and Development’. In attendance were Julia Thomas (PI), Anthony Mandal (CI), Tim Killick  (PDRA), Mike Pidd  (HRI  Sheffield), David Skilton (consultant), Paul Goldman (Honorary Professor, Cardiff University) and Rebecca Blackwell (Research and Consultancy Division, Cardiff University).

David began by circulating a list of experts who had been recruited to test the new features of the database. The discussion then turned to how we might best publicize the open source image management tool that will be made available at the end of the project. This presents and exciting and challenging opportunity to expand the structures and iconographic classification system developed on the Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration by making them freely available to those wishing to manage their own images. Omer Rana, who is directing the social tagging aspect of the project, could not be present at the meeting, but Tim reported that they had discussed how this might develop, starting with a workshop which would experiment with different ways of marking up and describing images. Finally, we looked at how the ICONCLASS  mapping was progressing. This is being undertaken by Etienne Posthumus  and Hans Brandhorst  (Amsterdam), who are translating our image tags into ICONCLASS  codes, with the aim of allowing multi-lingual searching of DMVI  and enabling the database to be compatible with other archives using ICONCLASS. The mapping is well underway and should be completed in the next few weeks.

The meeting concluded on a festive note with a Christmas lunch in Aberdare Hall and several bad cracker jokes. Luckily, everyone made it home before the snow began to fall …

Enhancing the Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration

Just a quick update to introduce myself and say I’m glad to be back at Cardiff and looking forward to working as the research associate on the new phase of DMVI. I’m still getting to grips with the project programme and trying to get in touch with all of the various people involved, but things are proceeding apace and we’ve got lots to look forward to in the new year.

As a reminder, the elements of the project are as follows: the database will be converted to open source software and remodelled to facilitate web-based data-entry; the iconographic cataloguing system will be extended to allow multi-lingual searches and will be integrated with another popular visual hierarchy, Iconclass; the iconographic system will be made available as an Open Source Image Curation System; the scope for integrating DMVI’s systems with Web 2.0 social networking technologies will be modelled; and the possibilities for developing DMVI as a teaching resource will be explored.

The aim of all this is to make the innovative technologies and methodologies developed by DMVI accessible to the widest possible audience – in terms of language, location, discipline and user profile. Elements of DMVI have already been deployed in other projects dealing with themes as varied as the history of Manchester and the history of Victorian periodicals. After the completion of this programme of research and enhancements, much more will be possible.