London’s Victoria & Albert (V & A) Museum has launched the pilot phase of the Chinese Iconography Thesaurus (CIT) project that has been in development since 2016. The goal of the project is to explore the complex relationships between images, ideas, and abstraction in Chinese art and history. Additionally, the project will offer researchers, curators, and students an opportunity to explore the complex relationships between images, ideas, and abstraction. It will also provide an insight into the significance or the meanings or layers of meanings of the images in Chinese culture.
In a significant move from the traditional, hierarchical structures favored by other institutions, the CIT project team at V & A is using a thesaurus, which is a special type of controlled vocabulary, as a foundation for the iconographic database. The thesaurus would also facilitate the building of a more complex relationship between the vocabularies, the terms, and the concepts.
Furthermore, the thesaurus format offers the functionality of weaving equivalent and associative relationships. By allowing associative relationships, the thesaurus format enables the CIT project team to build a system or a network of term relationships.
The CIT project team is focused on documenting the content of the images and the objects to create an iconographic database and linking it to the collection database of the individual museum. The collection database houses the other aspects such as chronology, dating, the place of production and other geographical features, which are documented in the museum and the library environment.
University students and the public will find the thesaurus format relatable. Particularly, the database will be very useful for university students who want to find a topic for their essay or their coursework. The iconographic database could benefit museum visitors and museum professionals. It may prove useful in the research phase of curating a thematic exhibition. The database could also be useful for professionals in creative industries interested in the hidden meanings of objects, or plants or animals in Chinese culture.
Currently, only three institutions—the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Palace Museum are involved in this pilot CIT project. There are plans to include other museums offering open access to their collection’s database in the near future.
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