Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland
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The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI) is an ongoing web-based research tool that freely provides expert reports and photographs of
History
The project was the brainchild of
CRSBI was recognised as an important development in Romanesque studies. In Kahn’s words, "it is worth noting an important decision: the British Academy's adoption of a project (the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in the British Isles), which should lead to a complete recension of the works concerned..."[5]
A Management Board was recruited to supervise, consisting of eminent scholars of medieval art and architecture.[6]
Volunteer fieldworkers, many of them Zarnecki's former students, were recruited for Scotland, Wales, and each of the English counties and a team led by Professor Roger Stalley of Trinity College Dublin undertook to record the Irish material. Initially, photography was on film, largely black and white, and photographs were scanned and digitised. The number of sites to be covered was estimated to be around 5,000, with perhaps 10-12 photographs per site on average.
Publishing the fieldwork
The British Academy suggested that the only hope for publishing the fieldwork lay in computing, and supplied an expert to help in Seamus Ross, the digital humanities researcher, who encouraged the project team to archive the text reports and digitised photographs separately. This, he argued, would simplify matters when they were eventually brought together.[citation needed]
In the spring of 1998 a pilot site was made available on the internet, containing information about the project and a few sample site entries with images. By 2001-02, site reports from the first counties were online: Berkshire, Sussex, Warwickshire, Bedfordshire and Worcestershire. The website also included a glossary and a guide to the complexities of chevron ornament.
Hosting the project
Initially the project was based at the Courtauld Institute, but in 2007 a change in their research policy led to a move to the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (later renamed the Department of Digital Humanities) at King’s College London, supported by its Director, Harold Short who had joined the CRSBI committee to provide much-needed IT expertise. By this time the importance of IT to the humanities was well established, and the CRSBI was the subject of a paper in The Expert Seminar (2006), published two years later.[7] The project has since left King’s College to become a virtual entity. Fieldworkers are responsible for putting their own research online, via to a system supplied by iBase Media Services, who work closely with the CRSBI.
Meanwhile the coverage has increased to cover more than 60 percent of the total identified sites (67 percent in England), and the CRSBI is recognised as a valuable resource for students and their teachers, historians, art historians conservators and heritage bodies worldwide.[citation needed]
References
- ^ "The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland". VADS. Retrieved 20 May 2023.
- ^ "University of Warwick, History of Art. Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, Leicestershire".
- ^ "Zarnecki, George | Dictionary of Art Historians". arthistorians.info. Retrieved 2022-12-15.
- ^ "Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland". The British Academy. Retrieved 2022-12-13.
- .
il convient de signaler une importante décision: celle de la British Academy d'adopter un projet (The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in the British Isles) qui devrait, s'il aboutit, déboucher sur une recension complète des oeuvres concernées...
- ^ The first board, chaired by Lasko, contained George Zarnecki, Neil Stratford, Eric Fernie, Roger Stalley, Paul Williamson, John Higgitt, Sandy Heslop and Deborah Khan. Ron Baxter replaced Deborah Khan when she took up a teaching post in the U.S.A.
- ^ Bentkowska-Kafel, A, ’Electronic Corpora of Artefacts: The Example of the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland’, in M. Greengrass and L. Hughes (ed.), The Virtual Representation of the Past, Ashgate, 2008, 179-190