Blog
Online, the open, free, multilingual and secondary database Wikidata for collecting structured data can be created and maintained by everyone together. Last year, we also initially added Wikidata search links integrated to prometheus and a few months later the ability to add the associated Wikidata ID to each image at the artist’s fields.
By the way, clicking on the pencil also allows you to make a correction. The edit function is planned for the “Title” and “Location” fields too and it will be available in the next weeks.
These Wikidata links, the existing ones and the created ones, will each take you directly from the image archive to the corresponding norm data in Wikidata. And you can search for the Wikidata IDs in prometheus.
If you want to know more about Wikidata, we recommend the next events from our schedule:
05/11/2023 kuwiki: tips & tools #6: Wikidata, online
05/11/2023 How can we use Wikidata & Co. and what do we give back? online
05/17/2023 Wikidata: practice to get started, online
Many of you have personal access to prometheus, with which you can create image collections, rate and comment on images, designate favorites and upload your own images to your own image database.
With this personal access, you can also add and update your profile if, for example, you want to use a different email address or if you have changed institutions for the new semester.
You can get to your profile by clicking on your name, top right:
On it, you can see your your name, email address,… Another click on the pen next to your name in the top right corner and you can change this information or change your institution or license. This way, you can access your content and favorites even after the change.
In the List of licensed institutions you can check whether your (new) institution is (currently) one of them. If so, select it, save the information and you will belong to the new institution. Your administrator can find you there, for example to extend your access, since all personal access to prometheus is limited in time. Administrators or the office determine the respective period. You will be notified by e-mail four weeks before the validity expires and you can contact the person responsible for the administration, who is named in the e-mail, for the extension (with a current semester certificate) or, as an administrator, contact the office.
If your personal access has already expired, it may still be possible to reactivate it with all your personal settings. Please ask before you create a new account and have to redo your work in the image archive. We’re happy to help.
With 196.372 records, the next image database is integrated in prometheus and has been available for a few days now: „RMN Musee Du Louvre“:
The collections of the Louvre include occidental art from the Middle Ages to 1848 as well as the art collections of the formative ancient civilizations and Islamic art. We hope you enjoy discovering them!
If you want to publish images that you have found in prometheus, there is a link to the image rights of the selected image directly on the image at the bottom of the left bar: §.
There, you will receive information on the image rights to the respective work (1.a.), the respective photo (1.b.), photo credits (2.) and the image database from which the work in the image archive originates. Since the publication permissions cannot usually be obtained directly from prometheus, as prometheus itself does not own any image rights, you will also find instructions there on how, with whom and where you can clarify the publication rights.
If you see § with an asterisk – §* – in the left bar below, you can obtain publication approval there via a direct link, for example for images from the bpk – picture portal of art museums, picture agency for art, culture and history, Prussian cultural heritage foundation , Berlin. Indicate what type of publication you intend to use this image for, fill out the form and submit.
With a personal access you can upload pictures into your own database within the image archive prometheus.
You can provide them with metadata, link them to objects and make them available to everyone in the image archive via the public image collections if they have been approved by the prometheus team after an editorial review in terms of quality assurance.
These images have not yet appeared in the search results. However, in the next few days, they can be found by everyone because they will then also be indexed like the images in the image databases.
You can now take part in our prometheus consultation hour every first Monday of the month. You have the opportunity to ask us your questions about the image archive, describe problems, or to express suggestions, wishes and criticism. Along the way, you will get to know our team. We will be online for the first time on March 6th from 3:00 p.m. during office hours. We will inform you about the zoom link in the next week via an info window in the image archive. If you do not yet have personal access but would like to take part in the consultation hours, please send us a short email to info@prometheus-bildarchiv.de.
In prometheus you have the possibility to download your image collection as a Zip archive or as a PowerPoint presentation. Next to the title of the image collection you see three icons on the right:
With a click on the second icon you start the download of the zip file with the folders, in each of which you have the image as a jpg file and all the associated metadata in a text file. With a click on the third icon you can export the whole image collection as a PowerPoint file. For each image including the metadata “Title”, “Artist”, “Dating” and “Location” a slide is created, which you can then edit further.
As part of the international Corpus Vitrearum the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Germany (CVMA) in Freiburg and Potsdam indexes medieval stained glass up to 1550. The results are published in the form of inventory volumes in topographical order according to processing regions in accordance with the uniformly defined guidelines of the International Corpus Vitrearum. In a digital image archive the overall and detailed images of the stained glass works processed in the corpus volumes are available. This open-access image database and its 7,960 images and records are now *integrated*in prometheus.
Once again, we begin this year with a look at the 2022 annual list of the artists you search for most often.
Status: 24.02.2023
Unfortunately, a “copy-and-paste error” crept in during the first publication, which initially made us wonder about the results, but then led us to take another closer look at the search queries. We discovered that the first 50 search queries were unfortunately lost during the copying process. We apologise and here are your correct Top 20 in 2022:
1. Max Ernst
2. Vincent van Gogh
3. Henri Matisse
4. Caravaggio
5. Claude Monet
6. Caspar David Friedrich
7. Hannah Höch
8. Otto Dix
9. René Magritte
10. Frida Kahlo
11. Cindy Sherman
12. Pablo Picasso
13 Gabriele Münter
14. Paul Klee
15. Jackson Pollock
16. Rebecca Horn
17. Gerhard Richter
18. Louise Bourgeois
19. Hilma af Klint
20. Gustav Klimt
Status: 17.01.2023
Paula Modersohn-Becker made it to the top in 2022, replacing Caspar David Friedrich, who did not make it into the top 20 in your searches. At 1, Paula Modersohn-Becker is thus of course also the most searched artist.
Paula Modersohn-Becker. View from the artist’s studio window in Paris, 1900, oil tempera, cardboard, 48.7 × 37 cm, Bremen; ArteMIS, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Kunsthistorisches Institut.
Here are your top 20 in 2022:
1. Paula Modersohn-Becker
2. Salvador Dali
3. Gustave Courbet
4. Albrecht Dürer
5. Claes Oldenburg
6. Marcel Duchamp
7. Man Ray
8. August Sander
9. Max Beckmann
10. Wolfgang Tillmanns
11. Jan van Eyck
12. Edvard Munch
13. Roy Lichtenstein
14. Franz Marc
15. Hieronymus Bosch
16. Berthe Morisot
17. Nan Goldin
18. Paul Gauguin
19. George Grosz
20. Giovanni Bellini
For Monopol, Google has been compiling a list of the most searched artists in Germany since 2013. In 2022, these ten living artists aroused the most interest on the platform:
1. Banksy
2. Gerhard Richter
3. Yoko Ono
4. Kaws
5. Marina Abramovic
6. David Hockney
7. Jeff Koons
8. Cindy Sherman
9. Damien Hirst
10. Wolfgang Tillmanns
So there we have a match. Your top 10 is also the top 10 in this list: Wolfgang Tillmanns.
Today, we want to take a brief look back at the year 2022 in the prometheus image archive. It was a year we started off with the integration of a first version of the image similarity search.
New filters for your search results in the advanced search followed.
With the Advanced search with dating filter it is possible to sort data sets by specific time periods and with „Filter by objects“ you get objects only displayed.
New image databases could also be integrated, like the HeidICON image pool „HeidICON – Kurpfälzisches Museum“, the inventory „Bestand Kölner Museen“ of the Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln and the museum database „Sammlungen Online Albertina“.
In coordination with the DigiROM-Project, we have decided to hide the display of Discriminating terms in the image archive at first level in the form of clickable asterisks and to display a notice.
With the Translations of technical terms the indexed English dictionary has been added and we are happy to record and add further references to missing terms to make your search easier.
In the detailed view of the images in the archive, you now also get a visual idea of the dimensions of the works
and you can add the corresponding Wikidata ID to the artist fields, to then search immediately for it in prometheus.
Outside of prometheus, on our YouTube channel, we have listed music videos in a playlist called Music videos about art.
In the year to come, we will continue to add new functions and will be able to integrate additional image databases. There is already a lot waiting. :-)
Max Beckmann. Happy New Year 1917, 1917, 29, 8 × 37 cm, Cleveland; The Cleveland Museum of Art.
