Developing an Open Catalogue Raisonné Platform

In conducting art historical or visual studies research, faculty, students, and independent scholars face the challenges of organizing images, descriptions of works, and related visual and textual resources, and, more often than not, do so by using available digital tools that likely were not designed to directly support these activities. Beyond simply organizing, researchers need reliable means for describing and then mining the significant relationships and interconnections that they have found or made between these resources. They may also want to share these resources online in order to promote dialogue and encourage new findings. Each of these pursuits can be addressed through the creation of a digital catalog (or, as appropriate, a catalogue raisonné) backed with a database structure.

In a guest post on the Digital Humanities at Berkeley blog, Senior Digital Curator Kathryn Stine provides an update on a collaborative research project that the Visual Resources Center has been conducting with Associate Professor Elizabeth Honig and incoming graduate student Jess Bailey to design an online toolkit that will support art history or visual studies researchers engaged in creating database-backed digital catalogs, the Online Catalogue Raisonné Platform (OCRP). The OCRP project team, which also includes Principal Digital Curator Lynn Cunningham, Senior Digital Curator Jason Hosford, and a Drupal consultant, has been working since early 2015 on preliminary designs for a freely available online platform, modeled on Professor Honig's online catalogue documenting Jan Brueghel's work. The OCRP will ultimately help researchers record, store, link, search, and share images, descriptions, and related resources as a catalog organized around authorship, theme, material and techniques, geography, or other attributes of the artwork or visual culture contained therein.

The OCRP project has been initially funded by through the Digital Humanities at Berkeley's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant "Capacity Building and Integration in the Digital Humanities" along with in-kind support from the Department of the History of Art.

CAA Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts

Much uncertainty surrounds how and when images or other copyrighted material can be used, especially for teaching and scholarship. For a use of copyrighted material to be considered fair in the United States, four factors should be considered (simplified below from those set out in Section 107 of U.S. copyright law) :

1. Purpose of the use
2. Kind of work used
3. Amount used
4. Effect on the market

While many educators, librarians, image curators, and other archives and museum professionals have become adept at reciting these four factors, their interpretation and lawful application is often quite complex and subject to emerging case law. Recent court decisions, including that in the Authors Guild v. HathiTrust (2014), are moving in the direction of qualifying, if not encouraging, how fair use can be applied when creating or sharing digital content.



The College Art Association (CAA) has recently released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. Made public just prior to the annual CAA conference last month (February, 2015), this new code of best practices seeks to provide a “clear framework in which to apply fair use with confidence, knowing the shared norms of [the] field.” It is preceded by CAA’s publication in 2014 of “Copyright, Permissions, and Fair Use among Visual Artists and the Academic and Museum Visual Arts Communities: An Issues Report,” a key finding of which was that “the practices of many professionals in the visual arts are constrained due to the pervasive perception that permissions to use third-party materials are required even where a confident exercise of fair use would be appropriate.” As it turns out, many of us who make and share creative work have been engaging in self-censorship because we’ve simply not found adequate clarity on how to apply fair use.

The new code is the result of the “consensus of professionals in the visual arts who use copyrighted images, texts, and other materials in their creative and scholarly work.” This team consulted legal experts and codes of practice developed by other communities to guide the application of fair use and gathered feedback from the CAA community through 12,000 surveys and discussions with 120 visual arts professionals, findings from which were published in the 2014 report.

Encouragingly, in addition providing vetted community consensus on fair use principles as they apply to work with visual arts, the CAA code also briefly addresses the use of public domain material. Even though this is not a primary focus of the code, the authors call upon “the reasoning of the decision in Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.,” to assert that “copyright-free material also includes faithful photographic reproductions of two-dimensional artworks, which are distinct from the artworks they depict.” And, while they acknowledge that Bridgeman does not “on its face apply to still photographs of three-dimensional works,” the authors note that these photographs “might be used pursuant to fair use in light of the principles and limitations set forth in the code.”

To learn more, the College Art Association is offering a series of five webinars on fair use in the visual arts starting March 27 and running through June 5.

Two projects in the Department of History of Art have received grants from the new Digital Humanities at Berkeley Initiative

Professor Lisa Trever submitted a successful proposal to integrate digital components into her fall 2015 course "Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas." This seminar will explore the traditions of palace, temple, and tomb painting in ancient and pre-Hispanic Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and the American Southwest, as well as modern and contemporary legacies of mural painting in Latin America and the United States. The Course Development Grant will allow the class to experiment with digital technologies for rendering digital models of ancient murals and for capturing site visits to murals in the Bay Area. This project is supported through the collaboration of digital curators and research specialists in the department's Visual Resources Center and the Archaeological Research Facility.

In addition, Professor Elizabeth Honig and the VRC have received Collaborative Research funds from the Digital Humanities initiative to create a repurposable platform that can be used to catalog the works of any visual artist. Built using Drupal, this platform will be made freely available to other scholars interested in building and sharing online catalogues raisonnés, which are among the critical research products/tools of art historians, typically including descriptions and images of all of the known works of a given artist. This grant will be an extension of Dr. Honig’s project janbrueghel.net, which is also a collaboration with colleagues from the Duke University Math department and is funded by the National Science Foundation, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the following UC Berkeley funders: CITRIS, URAP, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

A New Mobile Image Sharing and Projection App

We’re seeing increased adoption of mobile devices used for sharing and projecting images in the classroom and at conferences. A new iPad/iPhone app called Wölff (https://www.wolffapp.com/) promises to improve mobile device use in serving up images; it got a lot of buzz at the CAA 2015 conference, where it was just launched.

Named for the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (who embraced slide projection at the turn of the twentieth century) and designed for use on iPads, Wölff lets users crowdsource high-res images of works of art from a growing list of partner institutions. Created by Greg Bryda, an art history PhD student at Yale University, Wölff has been funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign. In Bryda’s words, the app “exploits the tactility of handling high-res digital images on touch screens,” supporting typical image investigation strategies used by art history faculty and students including panning, zooming, and side-by-side comparisons. Image presentations can be projected from an iPad/iPhone that connects to a projector system either using a dongle or wirelessly using AirPlay. Perhaps most exciting about Wölff is that those in the audience can follow along on their own mobile devices, exploring images both independently and concurrently with the presentation.

Wölff is available at several levels of service, with features and functions ranging from a basic, free subscription to fee-based subscriptions for either institutions or individuals. History of Art Visual Resources staff are eager to test-drive this promising app and will report back on its usability and suitability for incorporation into teaching for those interested in using mobile devices.

For more on Wölff, see this recent article in the Yale Daily News: http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/02/12/new-art-history-app-launched/