Digimasia
Project aim
The project "Digimasia: Digitalization of photographic materials on South and Southeast Asian Art and Archaeology" aims to provide digital accessibility to important European photographic collections on South and Southeast Asian Art and Archaeology and to implement this important source of information in teaching and research, specifically at MA level. The two collections that form the starting-point of this project, that of the Kern Institute of Indology at Leiden University and of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) in Paris, are strongly complementary in an area with fundamental cultural-historical interconnections, which do not correspond to modern political (nor to former colonial) boundaries. The project will also build on existing contacts with the Ancient India and Iran Trust (AIIT) in Cambridge, which holds the copyright of part of the photographic collection of the Kern Institute.
Project output
The expansion of an existing database (Digibeeld) that originally made local collections (images with metadata) on both western and oriental art and archaeology available for classroom usage. Digibeeld links separated collections and enables combined searching in multiple databases, independent of the specific software used to create them. Images can be searched, compared, downloaded, imported into papers and powerpoint presentations (even within Digibeeld), by both students and staff. External users do not have access to all the facilities of the system.
Project partners
The international partners are the École française d’Extrême-Orient (Paris, France) and the Ancient India and Iran Trust (Cambridge, UK).