Getty Institute Research Portal for Art History

Free and Open Access Unique Portal for Searching Across a Significant library of Online Texts about Art History by the Getty Institute

” the Getty aims to further knowledge and nurture critical seeing through the growth and presentation of its collections and by advancing the understanding and preservation of the world’s artistic heritage. ”

The GIR is a great new resource for anyone interested in the history of art and sources of open access text. Currently it is not a data mining resource. The screen image shows you how it works, the site contain reference material to why and how it operates. Its simplicty belies the complexity and sophistication of this resource. The portal accesses many other sources than just the Gettys own texts and most are already available elsewhere online, but now you can perform the single resource and know that the results will be open access full text.

There is the potential to add additional contributors and given the reach and reputation of the Getty Institute it is quite likely to be able to bring others into the fold. In terms of technology it provides search and download capabilities but the results are by title not instances in the text.

There is currently a debate between historians, digital humanities, mathematicians and technology researchers about the relevance and significance of text mining in historical research and across many areas of humanities and knowledge management. The jury is out whilst projects sophisticate their capabilities. We will be featuring some text mining capabilities you can experiment with yourself shortly.

Watch out for forthcoming posts in Archives & Collections and IT for History a& Historians Toolkit after the Jubilee Celebrations!

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