Digitizing and Encoding Art Collections and Archives

For Research, Museums, and Art Production

PROBLEMSFor the Visual Art Researcher

1. High Quality Images are too large to use easily.

2. Images are poorly tagged and coded.

3. No standards adhered to for coding makes images hard to find.

4. Copyright and Paywalls

Internet and coding in general is language-biased.“hypertext” “semantic web”

Roland Barthes “The Rhetoric of the Image” 1964Semiotic analysis of an Image

John Baldessari Pure Beauty oil on canvas 1968

Barnett Newman Vir Heroicus Sublimus 1950-51

Partial Solutions

• Attempts to standardize encoding of visual art objects

CIDOC: Comité des Documentation des Organization Culturelle

Visual Resource Association CORE

Make materials searchable across institutions by standardizing the encoding of the material.

Develop nifty platforms for sorting cultural heritage material that is useful for scholars

Projects1. Art History and the “Digital Humanities”

2. Virtual Architectural and Archeological Reconstructions and Virtual Tours

3. Museum and Archive Based Digitization Projects

Warhol Museum’s Capsule 21 Project

4. Artist-run sites for cataloging, archiving, community and promotion/exhibition

Digicult

What’s Needed to Make Digitization the Best Cultural Heritage Outreach and Research Strategy

1. More money and support for visual art digitization projects.

2. New technology that can automate part of the process of database development and encoding.

3. Further development of user-friendly but USEFUL interfaces for both scholars and the general public.