The Iconclass ecosystem
The main components
The scope of Iconclass
Iconclass can be used for a wide range of objects and images, produced at different times, in different locations, and across a wide cultural and social spectrum.
From classical Greek ceramics (the German Bildindex) to Japanese prints (Rijksmuseum) and computer games (ICS - International Computer Game Collection).
25N(ATLANTIS) fictitious countries: Atlantis
43C392 wrestling (sport)
31A5451 public baths
It covers the contents of paintings adorning houses (Vermeer), book illustrations visualizing moral lessons (emblem by Johann Mannich), and monumental mosaics conveying religious beliefs (Palermo, Martorana church mosaic).
It can be used to tag actions (pouring), material objects (foot-stove), abstract ideas (temperance), or stories (bathing the Christ-child) at every level of detail.
The scope of Iconclass
- 41B23 foot-stove
- 41C122 pouring
- 54A43(+11) Temperance, Moderation; 'Misura' (Ripa) (+ abstract concept represented by female figure)
- 41C122 pouring
- 54A43(+4) Temperance, Moderation; 'Misura' (Ripa) (+ emblematical representation of concept)
- 41C122 pouring
- 73B1321 bathing the new-born Christ-child (usually by the midwives)
It provides descriptors for paintings that commemorate historical events and for modern news photographs, linking their contents.
Iconclass concepts cover broad themes (battle) and specific details (medical aid to wounded soldiers).
The scope of Iconclass
45H3 battle
61I(WATERLOO, Battle of) names of historical events and situations (with NAME)
45C711 carrying the sick, wounded and dead off the battle-field
45C723 medical aid and nursing of the sick and wounded in a field-hospital
61I(UKRAINE WAR) names of historical events and situations (with NAME)
Retrieval: Browser
A single keyword (beggar) may suffice to find a fitting descriptor and sample images in the Iconclass Browser.
The Browser then provides
11P315(FRANCISCANS) monastic orders, monastic life: Franciscans
46A151 beggar
46A151 beggar
Retrieval: Browser
42B112 father with daughter(s) (father-love)
42B123 mother with son(s) and daughter(s) (mother-love)
42B113 father with son(s) and daughter(s) (father-love)
Keywords may be truncated and combined with other keywords and notations, allowing for flexibility and the fine-tuning of levels of recall and precision.
Retrieval: Browser
Keywords may even be combined with regular expression variants of notations into powerful and sophisticated queries.
The example shows a search for the keyword death limited to stories about persons from classical history - either male (98B) or female (98C), irrespective of the exact name entered between the brackets (\(.*\)).
98B(ALEXANDER THE GREAT)68 death of Alexander: Alexander on his deathbed
98B(AESCHYLUS)68 death of Aeschylus: an eagle drops a turtle on Aeschylus' bald head
Retrieval: heritage sites
25F22(+429) monkeys, apes (+ animal killing its own breed)
42B1 parental love
51H421(+4) Excess (+ emblematical representation of concept)
The retrieval of images with the help of words and codes from the Iconclass system, can be based on various principles.
Emblematica Online, for example, uses the Linked Open Data feature of the Iconclass Browser, which offers searchable SKOS and JSON versions of the concepts.
Retrieval: heritage sites
A different way to enable a heritage site to offer Iconclass-based retrieval is by deploying the so-called Harvester of Iconclass Metadata.
This is based on the principle that a heritage site uploads its Iconclass notations and the Persistent URL's of its objects to the central Iconclass server.
A dedicated Iconclass Retrieval Browser is then implemented and made available to the collection's website.
The example shown is that of the New York Collection of 17th century Dutch paintings.
42B7412 father and daughter(s) (family group)
71C1252 Lot's daughters make their father drunk
42B122 mother with daughter(s) (mother-love)
42D22 parental blessings and admonitions
71T631 Raguel gives Sarah to Tobias as his wife
Retrieval: heritage sites
31A222101 profane heart symbolism ~ love
Iconclass-based information may also be offered in the shape of a simple, static listing of the concepts used to tag the images of a collection.
The Broadside Ballads Online website of the Bodleian Library, Oxford provides an example of this approach. Local headings are manually added to indicate the subdivisions.
Retrieval: Arkyves access point
Applying the Harvester of Iconclass Metadata technology, the Arkyves website acts as a single access point to a hybrid "collection of collections".
The iconographic metadata of more than 20 collections and projects are gathered and made searchable from a single access point.
Retrieval: Arkyves access point
An iconographic search in Arkyves may be limited to a single type of source. These include medieval manuscripts and emblem books, but also photographs and proverbs.
But a single search may also address all collections simultaneously.
Retrieval: Arkyves access point
The theme of a mother and her children - 42B742 mother and child(ren), woman and child(ren) (family group) - is found in paintings and drawings, but also in a wide range of book illustrations. In Arkyves a query like that may also point to interesting co-occurences.
98C(HASDRUBAL'S WIFE)68 death of Hasdrubal's wife: she throws herself and her two children into the flames of the temple of Aesculapius, which she had set on fire, to show her contempt at her husband's surrender to Scipio
The Iconclass Bibliography
Iconclass was created with a dual purpose:
Recently we have started a project to revive the Iconclass Bibliography and include full texts of books and articles available under an open Creative Commons licence.
Bibliographic references will be hyperlinked to Worldcat and full texts will be added to the Iconclass Browser website.
Here a first impression of the idea: an anthology of author portraits, a fragment of the original (printed) Iconclass Bibliography and the title page of the Exhibition Catalogue, which is referenced in the Bibliography. The information will be found at 48C93 portrait of a writer.
The Iconclass Bibliography
The Grolier Club's exhibition catalogue will thus be included as a resource on the Iconclass site.
The mass digitization of primary visual sources makes it easier than ever before to follow its leads, e.g. to Wikipedia pages on Mary Beale and Aphra Behn, or her portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.
48C93 portrait of a writer
61BB2(BEHN, Aphra)11 historical person (with NAME) - BB - woman - portrayed alone
The Iconclass Bibliography
Boosting the functionality of the original Iconclass Bibliography does not automatically lead to new growth.
So we shall make room for new references to scholarly literature.
As the expansion of the Bibliography can only be user-driven, a Google Form has been created for registered users to upload new literature about the visual aspect of cultural history.
Artificial Intelligence
Iconographic research is a hybrid, elusive process of studying and connecting visual and textual sources.
If we want technology to make a contribution to the field of iconography, it should support this process with efficient software.
Pattern recognition will be part of this toolbox. It can help us compare and group images by their visual characteristics. Object recognition is advancing rapidly - tables and chairs are identified, as are jugs and dishes, windows and foot-stoves, and the postures of human figures.
Contextualizing, e.g. interpreting a maid pouring milk in a dish as a personification of Temperantia, however, is beyond the grasp of this software, unless we "teach" it with the help of informed datasets.
Artificial Intelligence
When an Iconclass concept is applied to an image, it connects the image to a specialized "Bag of words", and every BoW is part of a larger structure.
To facilitate the creation of better models in the cultural heritage domain, a dataset of 87,749 images with assigned Iconclass notations, was made available for use in machine learning projects.
A far larger dataset has already been used to add pattern recognition to the Illustrated Iconclass Browser.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence applications like OpenAI's chatGPT are based on a huge corpus of scraped data. From the perspective of Digital Humanities research, however, quantity is the least relevant aspect.
More relevant is how the aggregated - amorphous and chaotic - data are organized. The classifications used by BigTech companies for this purpose are not publicly available. Their biases are not transparant and cannot be modified by the users.
That is not the case with Iconclass.
Not only is this a classification tailored to the domain of visual communication, its raw data are deposited in Github, open to be edited by its community of users.
https://github.com/iconclass/