Coding Dürer

Tag: Open Data

  • Mapping Titian—Data Source Description

    Mapping Titian is a site that allows users to visualize one of the most fundamental concerns of the discipline of Art History: the interrelationship between an artwork and its changing historical context. Focusing on the paintings executed by the Venetian Renaissance artist, Titian (ca. 1488-1576), this site offers a searchable provenance index of his attributed pictures and allows users to create customizable collections of paintings and customizable maps that show the movement of the pictures over time and space with the application of various filters. The collections and maps can be shared with other users or can remain private. The site also includes a glossary with short biographies of patrons and collectors of Titian’s pictures and references with a selected bibliography of relevant scholarship. The main goal of Mapping Titian is to create a tool from which new research, discoveries, and experiences can be inspired, guided, and shared. The site was developed with a grant from the Kress Foundation by Jodi Cranston, Department of the History of Art & Architecture, Boston University, Boston MA. We encourage the Coding Dürer participants to register as users of the Mapping Titian site and will be happy to showcase any of the results from the event in March!

    The paintings by the 16th-century Venetian artist have proven to be an especially rich microcosm of possible directions for a mapping platform currently under development, Mapping Paintings, of which this current site would be one part. Titian’s pictures involve a variety of conditions and circumstances—a celebrity artist with a publicized reputation during and after his lifetime, the international city of Venice, a reliance on travel and letters for communication and exchange—which also play a role in the “lives” of artworks in successive time periods.  

    The data used to generate the Mapping Titian site can be accessed through the excel spreadsheet, which can be accessed here for the Coding Dürer event. There are two pages to the spreadsheet. The first page lists each painting with the unique identifier of a painting number and the fixed information about that painting. The second page lists each painting by its unique identifying number only and charts the changes of ownership and location (indicated by place name and longitude/latitude). Each painting number appears every time there is a change in ownership and/or location. Some paintings are listed only one time and others appear with more than 20 entries. There are additional notes and color codings on the spreadsheet which are not important for this event.  

    Provenance map of Titian’s Europa from 1550-2014

  • Europeana—Data Source Description

    Europeana is Europe’s digital platform for cultural heritage, providing online access to over 54 million digitised items  (from books, photos, and paintings to television broadcasts and 3D objects) from over 3500 cultural institutions across Europe in 31 languages. 20.8m records allow free reuse. In Europeana Art, our dedicated thematic collection for art and art history,  you can browse 1.4m objects, search by topic, artist, or colour, and explore specially curated exhibitions.

    You can access Europeana’s content either by manual download or via the Europeana APIs. We currently have four free-to-use APIs (accessible by a simple registration process) and we encourage you to register for your preferred API keys before the Coding Dürer event. The REST API is our key resource and most used API. It enables users to filter records by a wide variety of metadata fields  – from the metadata submitted by our data providers (e.g. date, creator) to the technical metadata we extract from the linked media files (e.g. image size or video duration) and the semantic enrichment from linked open vocabularies (e.g. enrichment for period, location, events, or persons). The Europeana Linked Open Data service allows you to explore, access, and download metadata through the SPARQL endpoint provided by Europeana. With the Europeana OAI-PMH service, users can harvest the entirety or a selection of, Europeana metadata. Finally, the Europeana Annotations API allows users to generate, update, and retrieve short descriptions for objects in our collections. Users can access comprehensive and regularly updated documentation on Europeana Labs and find answers to your questions on the Europeana API forum.

    On Europeana Labs you can also find nearly 90 thematic datasets containing high quality, openly licensed, and directly accessible items on topics ranging from art, design, and architecture to World War I. We also showcase reuse tools and examples of games, apps, and other creations that use the Europeana API and content. We hope to add interesting and innovative outputs from Coding Dürer to this list!

    Contact Nicole McNeilly if you have any questions or talk to Douglas McCarthy, Europeana Art & Photography Collections Manager, at Coding Dürer in March.

    Source

    Comment

    Format

    Licence

    URL

    Europeana Collections

    Data description (above)

    Europeana Data Model  (EDM)

    Various

    http://labs.europeana.eu, http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en

  • Open Data. Open-ended

    The word “hackathon” is a blend of the words “hack” (in the sense of exploratory programming) and “marathon”. The hackathon Coding Dürer is modeled after the hackathon Coding Da Vinci organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation, Wikimedia Germany and others. Its goal is to encourage institutions to liberate their data and bring this data into a creative context from which innovative projects might emerge. Hackathons are often built around industrial or communal data such as traffic data. Coding Da Vinci, on the other hand, expressively puts its focus on cultural data. In 2014, 17 digital cultural projects were realized using 16 datasets.

    We need open data. Only if data is available to the public, citizens, scientists, coders are able to use them for ends that no one has thought of before. That entails of course that the resulting data and code is open as well.

    We need an open end in the project. There are no limits as to what can be done. There are no restrictions set by the data suppliers as to what should be done. The end of the project is open in order to fuel creativity. No targets are set in order to yield fascinating results. 

    The purpose of Coding Dürer now is quite similar to Coding Da Vinci: Open data and open-ended. Its focus, however, is on art-historical data and to bring art historians and coders together. What can we do with art-historical data? What insights into art history might we gain? How can data visualizations give us an understanding of art? How can we build meaningful applications upon those data? How can we bring this data into a context never thought of before?

    Data sources might be:

    We invite interested institutions to join us and take the chance to present their data sources to the interdisciplinary group of 40 people and see what they are able to accomplish within those five days in March and possibly beyond. Please get in contact with us.

     

    The preliminary schedule of the hackathon will be published on this website soon. Please check back in a few days.

    Update: The list of data sources is available here.