duerer.online – Virtual Research Network Albrecht Dürer

• Applicants: Dr. Jochen Apel, since 10/2023; Dr. Thomas Eser
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 429483194

Albrecht Dürer and his work are among the most prominent topics of research in history of art. The renaissance artist is of special scientific value as the best-documented German artist of his era. The huge body of research focused on Dürer makes it a major challenge to maintain an overview of this scholarship. More specifically, the catalogues of drawings and paintings by Dürer published decades ago are now outdated; there is a huge body of original research about individual works; there now exist many digital resources published by different organisations that are often incompatible with each other; and many cross-links between texts and pictures are missing. The huge volume and diversity of sources, and the continued interest in the artist by scholars, make Dürer the ideal object for a digital platform. duerer.online offers a platform interoperable with other infrastructures which integrates existing digital resources, allows antiquated data formats to be connected, and facilitates updating of the resource with new data. It will pool knowledge, digitally combine dispersed data, making it a new invaluable resource for the digital humanities. In the first phase of the project, the printed works were recorded, supplemented by works of reception. In addition to a TEI-supported edition of the written estate, the holdings of the art collections of the City of Nuremberg, the Albrecht Dürer House Foundation (Nuremberg) and selected internationally renowned collections served as the data basis. In the second phase, the focus is on indexing the unique works (paintings, hand drawings, watercolours). This means that Dürer's entire oeuvre will be catalogued according to art historical guidelines as well as semantically linked. Furthermore, the documentation of unique works is supplemented by art technological aspects. The recording of works of Dürer's reception is expanded by two areas - graphic imitations of unique works and works of popular culture. The "Scientific Communication Infrastructure (WissKI)" used is a virtual research environment that enables the development of applications in the field of digital humanities using current standards. The classification and storage of the collected data is ontology-based on the basis of the ISO standard 21127 (CIDOC-CRM) and using the common standards file GND. In the second phase of the project, the accessibility and findability of the extensive information on Dürer's works will be improved and, in addition, user guidance features will be implemented that will enable potential users to comment on or add to existing content after the end of the project. The responsibility for the project lies with Heidelberg University Library and the integration into the specialist information service arthistoricum.net guarantees the connectivity and sustainability of the results in the sense of the FAIR principles. A connection to the NFDI4Culture-Knowledge Graph, which is currently being developed, is being sought.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Veit Probst, until 10/2023