Seeing Images: Metadata and Mediation in the Digital Archive

Sonya Petersson; Anna  Dahlgren

doi:10.3384/cu.3562

Authors

Sonya Petersson Stockholm University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1335-1080
Anna Dahlgren Department of Culture and Aesthetics https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7772-2739

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.3562

Keywords:

Image, Mediation, Metadata, Media history, Online image collections

Abstract

In the cultural heritage digital archive, descriptive metadata makes images (re)searchable. Text-based searches seek terms that match metadata terms or terms referring to aspects of images that have previously been considered essential to select and describe in metadata terms. Such considerations are bound up with historically changing institutional agendas, ideas about user preferences, and implementation of metadata standards. This study approaches image accessibility from a different perspective. It aims to investigate how the infrastructure of the digital archive, comprising metadata and interface, intervenes with, circumscribes as well as enables, the images’ visibility and knowledge-producing capacity. The starting points are: first, that images in digital archives, exemplified by the online image collections in Alvin and DigitaltMuseum, are mediated, mediating, and “mixed” media objects that simultaneously represent the past and the present; second, that the digital archive in a media history of images functions as both a tool and an object of research. Using the platforms as tools of research, this study is based on test searches that aim to find viable search strategies for mixed media objects. The chosen search terms represent media-historically significant and common traits such as images that are combined with text and images that represent and/or mediate other images. The study discloses that the platforms give both false negatives and false positives. They do not support searches that focus media terms and relations between media elements. These problems are further related both to heterogenous metadata practices and to the simultaneously restricted and broad image concept behind them. As objects of research, both platforms are considered in relation to a future construction of a media history of images, where the digital archive is a particular node. The study demonstrates how the “hypermedial” environment associated with new media is prefigured by media interrelations in analog images – or images that are accessible as mediated through the archive’s interface and as policed by the archive’s metadata structure.

Author Biographies

Sonya Petersson, Stockholm University

Sonya Petersson received her PhD in art history from Stockholm University in 2014. Since then she has conducted the post-doctoral project Graphic Illustration: Picture, Concept, and Combined Mediality from the Point of View of Mechanical Reproduction (2016–19). Her research interests include print media culture, word and image studies, and media history. She is presently (2020) enrolled in the Metadata Culture research group at Stockholm University.

Anna Dahlgren, Department of Culture and Aesthetics

Anna Dahlgren has written extensively on photography, image cultures, the digital turn, archives, and museum practices. She is PI of The Politics of Metadata focusing metadata practices and cultural heritage institutions’ image collections online and author of Travelling Images: Looking Across the Borderlands of Art, Media and Visual Culture (2018) and guest editor for the J. of Digital Culture & Society.

References

Algee-Hewitt, Mark et al. (2018): Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Alpers, Svetlana (1983): The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Alvin (no year a): “Background and History.” https://info.alvin-portal.org/about-alvin/background-and-history/ (accessed 1 December 2020).

Alvin (no year b): “Advanced Web Statistics.” http://www.alvin-portal.org/stats/www/2018/awstats.alvin.html (accessed 1 December 2020).

Andersson, Kent-Inge & Stefan Andersson (2020): “Katalogiseringsregler.” https://wiki.epc.ub.uu.se/display/alvininfo/Katalogiseringsregler (accessed 1 December 2020).

Barthes, Roland (1977): Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana.

Batchen, Geoffrey (2011): Repetition och skillnad: Fotografins re/production, trans. Cecilia Grönberg & Jonas Magnusson. Hägersten: CO-OP.

Bateman, John A. (2014): Image and Text: A Critical Introduction to the Visual/Verbal Divide. London: Routledge.

Bateman, John et al. (2017): Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis: A Problem-Oriented Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Belting, Hans (2005): “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology.” Critical Inquiry, 31:2, 302–318.

Beaudoin, Joan E. (2007): “Visual Materials and Online Access: Issues Concerning Content Representation.” Art Documentation, 26:2, 24–28.

Bernadou, Agiati et al. (2018): “Introduction: A Critique of Digital Practices and Research Infrastructures.” Agiati Bernadou et al. (eds.): Cultural Heritage Infrastructures in Digital Humanities. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1–14.

Bolter, Jay David & Richard Grusin (1999): Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Choi, Youngok (2017): “Nature of Tags in a Knowledge Organization System of

Primary Visual Resources.” Journal of Library Metadata, 17: 1, 37–53.

Dahlgren, Anna (2013): Ett medium för visuell bildning: Kulturhistoriska perspektiv på fotoalbum 1850–1950. Stockholm: Makadam.

Dahlgren, Anna (2018), Travelling Images. Looking Across the Borderlands of Art, Media and Visual Culture, in the series Rethinking Art’s Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Dellman, Sarah (2019): “Analogue Objects Online: Epistemological Reflections on Digital Reproductions of Lantern Slides.” Early Popular Visual Culture, 17:3–4, 322–340.

DigitaltMuseum (no year): “About DigitaltMuseum.” https://dok.digitaltmuseum.org/en/about (accessed 1 December 2020).

Drucker, Johanna (2014): Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Elkins, James, ed. (2008): Visual Literacy. New York: Routledge.

Eakins, J. P. (2002): “Towards Intelligent Image Retrieval.” Pattern Recognition, 35:1, 3–14. doi: 10.1016/S0031–3203(01)00038–3.

Elleström, Lars (2014): Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Elleström, Lars (2019): “The Modalities of Media II: An Expanded Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” Lars Elleström (ed.): Beyond Media Borders: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media, vol. I. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 3–91.

Ernst, Wolfgang (2013): Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. and intro. Jussi Parikka. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gartner, Richard (2016): Metadata: Shaping Knowledge from Antiquity to the Semantic Web. Switzerland: Springer.

Gill, Tony (2016): “Metadata and the Web.” Murtha Baca (ed.): Introduction to Metadata. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 21–37.

Gilliland, Anne J. (2016): “Setting the Stage.” Murtha Baca (ed.): Introduction to Metadata. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1–20.

Gran, Anne-Britt et al. (2019): “A Digital Museum’s Contribution to Diversity: A User Study,” Museum Management and Curatorship, 34:1, 58–78.

Heffernan, James A. W. (2006): Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions. Waco: Baylor University Press.

Hollink, Laura et al. (2004): “Classification of User Image Descriptions,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 61:5, 601–626.

Jappy, Tony (2013): Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics. London: Bloomsbury.

Jenkins, Henry (2006): Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

James, Alejandro & Shih-Fu Chang (2020): “Conceptual Framework for Indexing Visual Information at Multiple Levels.” SPIE Internet Imaging, 3964.

KulturIT (no year): “DigitaltMuseum.” https://kulturit.org/digitaltmuseum (accessed 1 December 2020).

Kungliga biblioteket (2000): Plattform för bilddatabaser. Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket.

Kungliga biblioteket (2003): Bilddatabaser och digitalisering – Plattform för ABM-samverkan: Ett samverkansprojekt mellan Kungl. Biblioteket, Nationalmuseum, Riksantikvarieämbetet och Riksarkivet 2001–2002. Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket.

Kungliga Biblioteket (2013): ”Katalogisatörens verktygslåda: Bilder.”

https://katalogverk.kb.se/katalogisering/Katalogisering/bildkatalogisering/index.html

(accessed 1 December 2020).

Lager Vestberg, Nina (2013): “Ordering, Searching, Finding.” Journal of Visual Culture, 12:3, 472–489.

Library of Congress (1995): “Thesaurus for Graphic Materials I: Indexing Images.” https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm1/iib.html (accessed 1 December 2020).

Loukissas, Yanni Alexander (2019): All Data are Local: Thinking Critically in a Digital Age. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

McKitterick, David (2003): Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (1986): Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2015): Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Moxey, Keith (2013): Visual Time: The Image in History. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mussel, James (2012): The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Parikka, Jussi (2012): What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press.

Pringle, Mike (2010): “Do a Thousand Words Paint a Picture?” Chris Bailey (ed.): Revisualizing Visual Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, 11–28.

Rajewsky, Irina O. (2005): “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” History and Theory of the Arts, Literature, and Technologies, 6, 43–64.

Riley, Jenn (2017): Understanding Metadata: What is Metadata, and What is it For? Baltimore: National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

Seeman, Dean & Heather Dean (2019): “Open Social Knowledge Creation and Library and Archival Metadata.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, 3:1, article 13.

Stoichita, Victor I. (1997): The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, Julia (2011): “Iconographic Description in DMVI.” Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration. https://www.dmvi.org.uk/guide.php?page=11 (accessed 1 December 2020).

Waldron, Zoe et al. (2018): “Cataloging and Metadata Practices Survey Report. December 20, 2017.” VRA Bulletin, 45:1, article 3.

Wildfeuer, Janina et al. eds. (2019): Multimodality: Disciplinary Thoughts and the Challenge of Diversity. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Williams, Keith et al., eds. (2019): Art and Science in Word and Image. Leiden: Brill Rodopi.

Wolf, Werner (2009): “Metareference Across Media: The Concept, its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions.” Werner Wolf et al. (eds.): Metareference Across Media: Theory and Case Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1–85.

Wolf, Werner (2011): “Is There a Metareferential Turn, and If So, How Can It Be Explained?” Werner Wolf (ed.): The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1–47.