Hi Reader! Hauling George Moore across the digital divide takes a lot of housekeeping. By that I mean cleaning, repairing, correcting, polishing, replacing, filling in, fleshing out, and testing his data. 

This may be true of other modernist masters, but maybe not as true. For years they’ve been serviced by an academic-industrial complex of investigators, librarians, curators, collectors, editors and publishers. Their data have been thoroughly scrubbed, but Moore’s have not.

Lately I’ve been scrubbing the Iconography of George Moore, which I myself originated as a lecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a paper in the Irish Arts Review. It was a simple and straightforward thing to give a lecture to listeners and write a paper for readers; it’s another thing entirely to build a dynamic database for users. That’s what I’m doing now.

To build it well I first had to decide how people of various stripes may use the Iconography, then design so that every foreseeable use case is supported. Supporting usage is nothing like the pedagogic hustle of informing and teaching. Design in this instance is less about imparting knowledge to people than enabling and rewarding their behavior. It depends on identifying the structural affordances in a data set, making them apparent, and facilitating their operation. 

For this fairly large database of pictures my scrub involves folding hard and soft facts into resources that increase their purport. That’s different from scholarly exegesis; it’s more about enlarging a picture’s intrinsic meaning to include causes and effects. It mandates going beyond classic footnotes that reveal sources of evidence to embedding links that trigger and elucidate the relationships inherent in, and with, the data — some of which are obvious, many of which are not.

Each picture in my digital Iconography of George Moore — including images of other people, of places and of things — is a manifold visual datum: a thing to view the way artwork on the wall or floor of a gallery is viewed. You can look at each picture and reflect. If that’s all you care to do, you’re then ready to move on.

That said, since these pictures are in cyberspace rather than on a wall or floor, you have more ways to engage. Because they are interactive, you can interrogate, manipulate, interpret, order and align them. Each picture can merely be viewed but also used as a tool for exploration.

By scrubbing visual, textual and quantitative metadata, I have absorbed lots of physical properties and social history into my iconographic records, and given the whole project a pulse. Even if it’s not definitive, each record will facilitate every use case that I have foreseen. 

So far then, scrubbing the data involves encoding, for each of the hundreds of pictures, the following metadata:

1. Unique Identifier ….. a GMI catalog number
2. Category ….. genre, kind or class of the picture
3. Name of Creator ….. who made the thing
4. Link to Creator ….. Wikipedia entry or surrogate
5. Name of Picture ….. in my iconography (not the given name)
6. Link to Picture ….. external URL
7. Thumbnail ….. low resolution PNG
8. Date of Picture ….. when the picture was made
9. Aetatis ….. age of George Moore in a picture
10. Locus ….. where he was situated at that time
11. Medium ….. materials used to make the picture
12. Dimensions ….. imperial and metric
13. Description ….. the picture’s alt text
14. Literary References ….. expert commentary
15. Related Pictures ….. similar or comparable
16. Published ….. by whom, in what and when, with page number
17. Owner ….. a person or institution
18. Collection ….. the owner’s metadata
19. Location ….. where the owner keeps the picture
20. Contact Information ….. of the owner
21. Notes ….. ad hoc

You may have noticed that high-resolution TIFs of pictures are not on my list, though they are needed for some use cases. There are legal and financial reasons for excluding them from the Iconography. That said, with metadata that I do provide, you’ll be able to request a high-res image directly from an owner.

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