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New Drupal 9 Website Launch

    The Dictionary of Art Historians is thrilled to announce the launch of its updated website, https://arthistorians.info. The site was updated from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 and is planned to be updated to Drupal 10 in 2023.

    The Dictionary of Art Historians is a free biographical dictionary of historians of Western art written and maintained by scholars for the benefit of the public. It became associated with the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies of Duke University in January of 2010. From 2016 on, it has been part of the Duke Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab.

    Website Update Highlights:

    • Add new field Career. Many art historians worked in fields outside of or adjacent to academia. This field is populated for approximately one third of the Dictionary and will be filled in further over the next few months.
    • A standardized list of institutions with which art historians were affiliated.
    • Full implementation of the Getty’s Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) in the Subject Area and Career fields with some local terms and vocabulary from Homosaurus included.
    • Full implementation of the Getty’s Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) in the Home Countries field with plans to implement for Place Born and Place Died fields.
    • Implementation of Homosaurus for the Gender field. Currently, tags are available for male, female, and unknown. Identification of gender is based on how individuals referred to themselves or how reliable sources referred to them. This remains a problematic field given that gender identity shifts over time and across cultures, but we feel it’s a vital field that will make it possible for us to highlight women, trans, and non-binary art historians. The Homosaurus vocabulary will help us to implement a flexible terminology over time.

    It is worth mentioning that the Browse Entries page now has a number of filters for browsing: Gender, Country, Subject Area, Career, Institution. And entries data are available via a JSON API, see more details in https://arthistorians.info/about/.

    The Dictionary of Art Historians is an effort by the Duke University scholarly community. The project has received funds via the Duke Undergraduate Research Support Office and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to compensate student research assistants. Users are able to select a name in Contributors to see the entries contributed by that researcher.

    What’s more, new entries for the Fall 2022 Student Research Assistants will be uploaded in the coming weeks. Please keep checking back!

    By Xinyue Gao