Susan L. Siegfried

Getty's Synoname™ and its cousins: A survey of applications of personal name-matching algorithms

The study reported in this article was commissioned by the Getty Art History Information Program (AHIP) as a background investigation of personal name‐matching programs in fields other than art history, for purposes of comparing them and their approaches with AHIPs Synoname™ project. We review techniques employed in a variety of applications, including art history, bibliography, genealogy, commerce, and government, providing a framework of personal name characteristics, factors in selecting matching techniques, and types of applications. Personal names, as data elements in information systems, vary for a wide range of legitimate reasons, including cultural and historical traditions, translation and transliteration, reporting and recording variations, as well as typographical and phonetic errors. Some matching applications seek to link variants, while others seek to correct errors. The choice of matching techniques will vary in the amount of domain knowledge about the names that is incorporated, the sources of data, and the human and computing resources required. Personal name‐matching techniques may be included in name authority work, information retrieval, or duplicate detection, with some applications matching on name only, and others combining personal names with other data elements in record linkage techniques. We discuss both phonetic‐ and pattern‐matching techniques, reviewing a range of implemented and proposed name‐matching techniques in the context of these factors.

A profile of end‐user searching behavior by humanities scholars: The Getty Online Searching Project Report No. 2

The Getty Art History Information Program carried out a two-year project to study how advanced humanities scholars operate as end users of online databases. Visiting Scholars at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California, were offered the opportunity to do unlimited subsidized searching of DIALOG® databases. The second report from the project analyzes how much searching the scholars did, the kinds of search techniques and DIALOG features they used, and their learning curves. Search features studied included commands, Boolean logic, types of vocabulary, and proximity operators. Error rates were calculated, as well as how often the scholars used elementary search formulations and introduced new search features and capabilities into their searches. The amount of searching done ranged from none at all to dozens of hours. A typical search tended to be simple, using one-word search terms and little or no Boolean logic. Starting with a full day of DIALOG training, the scholars began their search experience at a reasonably high level of competence; in general, they maintained a stable level of competence throughout the early hours of their search experience.

An analysis of search terminology used by humanities scholars: The getty online searching project report number 1

The Getty Art History Information Program carried out a two-year project to study how humanities scholars operate as end users of online databases. Visiting Scholars at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California, were offered the opportunity to do unlimited subsidized searching of DIALOG® databases. This first report from the project analyzes the vocabulary terms twenty-two scholars used in their natural language descriptions of their information needs and in their online searches. The data were extracted from 165 natural language statements and 1,068 search terms. Vocabulary categories used by humanities scholars were found to differ markedly from those used in the sciences, a fact that imposes distinctive demands on thesaurus development and the design of online information systems. Humanities scholars searched for far more named individuals, geographical terms, chronological terms, and discipline terms than was the case in a comparative science sample. The analysis provides substantial support for the growing perception that information needs of humanities scholars are distinct from those of scholars in other fields, and that the design of information-providing systems for these scholars must take their unique qualities into account.

Research practices of humanities scholars in an online environment: the Getty online searching project report No. 3

Abstract Use of online databases by humanities scholars searching as end users was monitored in a 2-year project conducted by the Getty Art History Information Program. Visiting Scholars at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California, were offered the opportunity to do unlimited subsidized searching of DIALOG ® databases. This third report from the project presents results of interviews conducted with the scholars regarding their experiences with searching, the role the searching took in their broader research activities, and their attitudes about the future of online searching in the humanities. Scholars found the experience stimulating and novel, with comments ranging from its “addictive” properties to a “Sorcerers Apprentice” quality to complaints about the “industrialization of scholarship.” Generally, the scholars saw DIALOG searching as supplementing their usual research methods, and not changing them in a fundamental way. Online searching was seen as particularly useful for interdisciplinary research, and as possibly setting a new standard for the extent of literature that should be reviewed. Identified problems were about equally divided between difficulties with the search interface and lack of desired types of resources. All foresaw online searching being used in the future by arts and humanities scholars.

Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History

Part of a symposium on how digital technologies affect the practices of art and art history. The writer discusses new possibilities and problems that arise from the introduction of digital imagery and networking into the teaching of art history. New computer-based technologies confront teachers of art with many opportunities, but a great deal remains to be done to find the most effective pedagogy to take advantage of them. Teachers must remember that their art historical knowledge and their experiences of how students learn are their most important assets. It is that knowledge that will allow them to give “added value” to the countless images of works of art that new technologies are making available.

Naked History: The Rhetoric of Military Painting in Postrevolutionary France

In the wake of the French Revolution, artists faced the challenge of representing contemporary military history without allegorizing it. Gross Battle of Nazareth and Lejeunes Battle of Marengo represent two new pictorial rhetorics that responded to a new ideology of war. These transformations in French battle painting raised the issue of what people could accept as art, a contemporary reception that the essay also considers.

Ingres and the theatrics of history painting

Abstract The careers of Paul Delaroche and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres touch at many points. One of the earliest, and the first public occasion, was the Paris Salon of 1824, where both men exhibited important paintings — Joan of Arc in Prison and the Vow of Louis XIII (figures 1 and 2). The artists were a generation apart—Delaroche was 27 years old and Ingres 43 that year—yet both were addressing the same problem, how to represent history. Negotiating the meaning of the past was a central concern of European culture, particularly in France, in the decades following the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. I want to compare the different ways that Delaroche and Ingres visualized the historical imagination of their day, beginning with works from the 1820s, a defining moment in each of their careers.

The visual culture of fashion and the classical ideal in post-Revolutionary France

In her little-known painting A Study of a Woman after Nature (1802), Marie-Denise Villers exploited a conjuncture between masculine-inflected ideals of Neoclassical art and feminine-inflected ideas of fashionability in the post-Revolutionary period in France by making a feature of female dress while emulating the standards of history painting. The artists confident synthesis of idioms is examined in the context of Albertine Clément-Hémerys memoir of a womens art studio. Walter Benjamins notion of gestus is enlisted as a means of understanding how the quite different image cultures invoked in this work communicated social ideas.