Glossary
Terms used in this archive
Defined in plain language, in the sense this institute uses them. Where a term comes from German-language scholarship, the original is given; where our use is narrower than the scholarly one, we say so.
- IconographyIkonographie
- The identification of the subjects depicted in a work — this is Judith, that is a vanitas. It answers what is shown. Panofsky’s Level II.
- IconologyIkonologie
- The interpretation of what a work meant within the culture that produced it: its symptomatic content, the assumptions it carries without stating. It answers what it meant. Panofsky’s Level III, and the level this archive is least able to supply.
- Pre-iconographicVorikonographisch
- Description before interpretation: shapes, figures, objects, gestures, named without reference to what they signify. A woman holding a severed head, not yet Judith. Panofsky’s Level I, and the only level this archive can populate from data alone.
- MotifBildmotiv
- A discrete depicted element that an annotator named when looking at a work. A claim about what is present, not about what it means. Every chip in this archive is a motif; clicking one filters the index by it.
- Agreement
- How many annotations applied a motif to a work, normalised against that work’s strongest motif. The superscript on every chip. It is not a confidence score: the model does not report its certainty here, and a high agreement figure means many annotators said the same thing, not that they were right.
- RecordDatensatz
- One work and everything the archive holds about it. Every record carries a stamp: the date its metadata was generated, the model that generated it, and the run number.
- Dossier
- The page for a single record, structured as a descent through the three levels. See any work in the index.
- Provenance stamp
- The bordered red block on each dossier, naming dataset, model, run and human-verification status. It borrows the form of a print-room collection stamp — a mark applied to the archive rather than part of the interface.
- Ground
- The background a section is set on: paper, slate, or void. In a dossier the ground changes with the Panofsky level. The control in the masthead chooses which ground the site rests on.
- ARTigo
- The source dataset: a games-with-a-purpose project that collected image annotations for artworks from human players. Every human annotation in this archive originates there.
- Unreviewed
- No human has checked the attribution on this record. It is the default state and it is not a defect; the archive is larger than its reviewers.