Digitization, data recording and online-publication of the “Image Index of Political Iconography”

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Kept at Warburg-Haus in Hamburg, Germany is the "Image Index of Political Iconography" (Bildindex zur Politischen Ikonographie, BPI), which was established in 1991 by Martin Warnke and has since been continuously expanded. The BPI consists of about 200,000 index cards with reproductions of artworks, but also additional material such as photos, newspaper excerpts, and literature references. The index cards are organized alphabetically in a system of almost 1,000 content-based index terms from the areas of political culture and social history. Aside from key contents such as the rulers iconography, the BPI contains a multitude of captions on the political motivation and significance of artworks. The BPI also allows tracing cultural and historical traditions of visual themes and subjects, often characterized by mythological and religious symbolism, from Antiquity up until the present day. The project aims to digitize the entire corpus of index cards, gain a comprehensive understanding of its methodology, and make it searchable in a free-access public online database while keeping the same indexing system. This is to be accomplished as a collaboration between Warburg-Haus, German Documentation Center for Art History – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, and Thüringer Universitäts und Landesbibliothek Jena in association with digiCULT-Verbund eG. In addition, enhancing the cards with authority control and index terms for subject cataloguing will serve to provide advanced research and networking possibilities as well expandability of the index. In a digital form, the BPI will provide a source pool of materials from which additional research projects can emerge. Political iconography and the index are viewed from two different research angles: as a research area with an interdisciplinary genesis and history of ideas which must be critically acknowledged, and as an innovative method of art and media history that will prove viable also in the digital space. Aside from including the material in research and teaching, there will be a symposium with a publication to follow. A coordinated research cooperation is planned with the research project "Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology" (Warburg Institute, London; Humboldt-Universität, Berlin; Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin; Warburg-Haus, Hamburg), financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and carried out in cooperation with Max Weber Foundation.