Welcome to The Encyclopedia of Assumed Physiognomy
Purpose of The Encyclopedia of Assumed Physiognomy
In modern times information is more available than ever, if you’re unsure of what an animal looks like you can use a variety of web search tools and get an image within seconds.
Things were not so simple in the past. To accurately depict a creature the artist would have had to physically see it or reference it from other works.
The artists in this collection did not do that. Some of the works are the best guess of an artist at what an animal looks like, while others are the result of an elaborate game of telephone: people who know someone who saw something would give their best description to the artist.
The objective of this collection is to gather these works from various artists, locations, and time periods and exhibit them together. Showing these works together can create links on how humans assume other creatures look like. In my research I saw that many of the pieces reminded me of how a child would draw an animal. Perhaps there is some psychology behind some of the deliberate choices made by the artists.
Resource Template Decisions
In this site, I sorted the pages into Item Set, Items, and Tags. Item Set is called ...... which acted as a repository for the collected images. Images can be found on the page titled "The Collection". The metadata collected for these images are recorded in the image metadata, this includes a number metadata elements from Dublin Core. These elements are comprised of the follow: Titles, Identifier, Creator, Contributor, Spatial Coverage/Place, Date, Description, Subject, Medium, Extent, Format, Language, Publisher, Type, Temporal Coverage, Alternative Title, Relation, Provenance, Is Replaced By, Replaces, Rights, Rights Holder, and Account. Not all of these elements were used in the metadata of each item but they helped guide the information detailed.
Controlled Vocabulary Decisions
- Creator
- Getty: The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) was used to keep first name, last name organization consistent and to find artists that have less information that is publically available online
- Spatial Coverage
- Getty: The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) was used to clearly define the location the objects came from or are currently housed
- Subject
- LC: Subject Headings were used to clearly define what the images are or what culture the images came from