CHArt CHArt Computers and the History of Art - 1998 Conference Paper Abstract
Collections of digital images are becoming common ground with musea showing their collection on the internet or CD-ROM. The last year some institutions (in the Netherlands) have digitized their collections of photographs and/or documents. The aim is almost always to present small scans big enough for screen viewing to reduce access to the original photograph or document.
It is interesting to see that this kind of collections are mainly aimed at and used by historians, and not art-historians because historical documents and photographs are not considered to be art. And it is much more interesting to see that historians and art-historians differ in the way they want to gain access to their research material: interface, access and retrieval methods vary wether the collection is of interest for historians or art-historians. Or they should vary ...
Art historians expect to be able to search a database on topics which they already use for a long time, and are formalized in classification schemes like IconClass. The consequence is that most of the image collections are accessible in an art-historical way: all kinds of technical data are recorded in the database with the digital images, like technique and material used by the artist, history of the object, what the artist meant by creating the object, a description of the content of the image which is based chiefly on the iconological level (Panofsky).
Historians tend to search for other types of information, they are looking for data to reconstruct the past. Most of the time those data are retrieved from the traditional sources available to historians, but more and more images, especially photographs gained the interest of this group of researchers. And they want to know who or what is visible in the picture, and why they are there, at what moment. Historians do not want to know who took the picture, with what kind of camera on which type of film. But they sure would like to know wether there are more pictures with the same subject, place and time.