Open Art History
From Open Knowledge Foundation
Overview
Access to high quality reproductions of art images and to literature & data concerning art history is of great value to artists, critics, art historians, art theorists and educators.
I recommend an OpenHogarth project as a pilot project due to the availability and reproducability of Hogarth's work, its social and historical relevance, its art historical importance, and its popularity with the general public. Hogarth's literary nature is also a link to OpenLiterature, and his place in the history of the copyright of art makes him an interesting subject for a Free Knowledge project.
Legal
See Wikimedia's statement on copyright of reproductions of public domain artistic works:
They claim that using reproductions form books is fine. Ideally we'd make our own photographs from primary sources, though.
Projects
Images
Etchings and other line work are ideal for high-resolution scanning at low bit-depths.
The Notebooks Of Leonardo Da Vinci
Da Vinci's notebooks are available in translation in text form from Project Gutenberg. Scans of the accompanying images would greatly add to the value of the notebooks, and are some of the most famous, informative and well-executed drawings in art history.
Durer's Etchings and Notebooks
Hogarth's Prints
Hogarth's work is influential and of great social and historical interest. It also ties in to the literature of the time, which would be good for corssing over with OpenLiterature.
Paintings Of The Impressionists
These are well known but not all are out of copyright yet (notably Monet). Their precursor Manet might be a more interesting figure socially and academically though. And now you can custom writing unique papers.
Drawings and Paintings Of Turner
TODO
Texts
Da Vinci's Notebooks
Gather various translations and transcriptions of these famous notebooks. Allow people to annotate and cross reference them.
Vasari's "Lives Of The Artists"
Again, gather translations. This might be useful for producing a database of artists.
Hogarth's Essay On Art
Not of primary historical interest but a good tie in to his work.
William Morris, John Ruskin
Victorian art writers. Now public domain.
Tying It Together
Tagging of text and images to produce folksonomies. Cross-referencing of these. Iconography, technique and other taxonomies.
Cross-referencing of images, texts, and text and images.
Links To Other Projects
- Archives & Museum Informatics
- Museum Computer Network - dlist
- Institute of Museum and Library Services
Sources
To Do
Set-up phase
1. Research and write standards for representing information about art works and artists. Preferably a format that is both human and machine readable. The format and any resources must be free and open.
2. Write the attribution standards for the project.
3. Decide on the repository layout.
4. Write image format, image source, and image quality guidelines for the project.
5. Create project structure for OpenHogarth and upload to svn.
Initial Image Gathering Phase For OpenHogarth
1. Images from Wikimedia Commons.
2. Images from archive.org books.
