CIRSS Seminar: Hans Brandhorst

Hans Brandhorst will present "Iconclass, Arkyves and the use of Iconography Vocabulary Standards to Enhance Access" at this CIRSS Seminar.

Brandhorst will provide a brief introduction to Arkyves.org (a Brill online resource) and Iconclass, a classification system designed for art and iconography. As a long-time partner in Emblematica Online (a project led by Mara Wade of the University of Illinois and Thomas Stäcker of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel), Brandhorst will then lead a discussion of how vocabulary standards like Iconclass are applied in order to enhance discoverability of and access to cultural heritage visual information resources, including Early Modern Emblem books.

Iconclass is an extensive, extensible hierarchical descriptive vocabulary established in the 1950s by Henri van de Waal at the University of Leiden. It has evolved over time and is now available online as a Linked Open Data service under the management of the RKD (Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie / Netherlands Institute for Art History) in The Hague. Iconclass contains more than 28,000 terms and is multi-lingual, with classification terms available in five languages (English, German, French, Italian and Finnish). Arkyves is reference tool for the History of Culture, providing single-point access for thematic searches across a wide variety of cultural heritage collections, contributed by partners like the Dutch Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands Institute for Art History, the Herzog August Bibliothek, and the university libraries of Milan, Utrecht, Glasgow, and Illinois.

Brandhorst is an art historian (Leiden University, 1982). He works as an independent researcher in iconography. He also works part time for the institutional repository 'RePub' at the Library of the Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He has been the co-editor of Iconclass since 1990 and primary editor of Iconclass and Arkyves.org since 2002.