Unconference Critique Digitale

Panel 1, Session 3- Basel

Do., 21.10.21, 13.30 - 14.15

Title: Combining information from diverse collections and sources – accessing visualization

By Victoria Fleury

How often were artworks reproduced during Monets lifetime?

Quantitative analysis:

• While later paintings (like the water lilly paintings) were only rarely reproduced, Monets earlier work (ex. “Camille or the woman with a green dress”) was reproduced more often –> Artworks painted in the beginnings of monets career were more often reproduced; this is surprising because he is more famous for his later works today!

• Issues with quantitative analysis: biased databases, translations from objects to database to visualizations

  9 participants were present at the discussion

Problem: Sample could be biased! (what is being digitized, and what isn’t) - mostly western, european art –> Interesting article by Ian Milligan, a Canadian historian: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/527016

For western researchers it is difficult to look at archives for example in Japan, because you might have problems to understand the language \& the use of a different metadata

Victoria Fleury only looked at metadata, it would be interesting to utilize an image recognition technique –> and find replicas of paintings through that.

Are there any metadata standards in art history? NO!

–> A good archive that Vicoria Fleury used in her research: https://prometheus-bildarchiv.de/en/prometheus/index

There is a problem when it comes to metadata:

Either each community has their own standard, and it is too specific to apply it to other researches OR as a researcher you could use the standards of big initiatives (but they are often too broad, and not specific enough) –> There is no middle-ground!!