Charlotte Boland  0:04  
Good afternoon everyone. My name is Charlotte Boland and I am Senior Curator for research and 16th century collections at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and I'm going to speak today about the galleries Tudor project, which is serving as a user perspective case study for engagement with IIIF, to enable image-led research across collections, and for which a demonstrator is going to be built as part of this foundation project, and to stress at the outset that I'm very much speaking from the perspective of someone who is aware of the possibilities of IIIF, but is currently learning how to engage with it at a practical level, in order to support cross-collection research projects. So the story so far: so the National Portrait Gallery holds the largest collection of Tudor portraits in the world, and in way back in 2007, began the Making Art in Tudor Britain project led by Dr Tony Cooper, which aim to undertake a technical survey of nearly 200 works in the collection. In order to advance our understanding of artistic practice in Britain in the 16th century. And the Making Art in Tudor Britain project was interdisciplinary, with a team consisting of curators, conservators, art historians, and conservation scientists, and it generated a very large number of images as paintings come into the galleries Conservation Studio for photography, photo microscopy, X- radiography, infrared reflectology, and dendrochronological analysis. And these images formed in ever-growing research resource, and were continually drawn upon, often challenging the interpretation from the earliest the project as more comparative data was gathered and digital imaging transformed over the course of the project. So for the first two years, the images were initially stored on CDs at the gallery, before being allocated a dedicated drive on the network, and technology of course, completely changed over time of the project, and particularly the digital cameras used for standard photography, and the equipment used for infrared imaging so what we have is multiple images of the same painting using different technologies. And the gallery was able to publish all this research online through the project database, which incorporated a selection of images from technical analysis, and working with Joe and Cogapp, we were able to include an incredibly useful tool that allowed for zoomable comparative viewing of images. So as you can see here with the Zoom detail from a portrait of William Werum with visible light, X ray, and infrared images, and this was a really great means of disseminating research into the collection, and the images from the project were also available for consultation within the gallery's Heinz Archive, or for download through the rights and images team, but in terms of facilitating cross-collection research, the image of images are still very much siloed within the gallery. And cross-collection research has played a key role in the project from its inception. Most simply in the first instance, in the desire to undertake comparative research into contemporary versions of portraits in the gallery's collection. So I show here two versions of a portrait of Elizabeth I's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, by John De Critz the Elder, one in the gallery's collection, and one at the Yale Center for British Art. And these two works are very unlikely ever to be in the conservation studio at the same time. So comparative analysis can only take place through sharing images. And in 2012 when the gallery's collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art first began, this was only possible by sharing image files via USB sticks, and through file sharing systems such as Dropbox  and then sort of constructing elaborate PowerPoints, after flicking between multiple images, and the YCBA really picked up the baton of Research in Tudor portraiture, through their reformation to restoration project led by Dr Edward Town and Jessica David, and where the National Portrait Gallery's project has used our collection to consider the broader questions of artistic practice, the YCBA took the next step to expand the survey in order to reconsider the attribution of the 30 works in their collection. And as the project teams dataset grew to encompass 1000s of images of works from private and public collections across the world, and those that are passed through auction houses and dealers, it became evident that digital solutions were required to be able to critically engage with the images at scale. And so the YCBA has been one of the earliest adopters of IIIF, which continues to be championed by Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass collections at the center, and IIIF compliant images of the works in their collection, that are in the public domain, are made available through their online catalog and shown here, a portrait of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and is a first favorite. And as the National Portrait Gallery collaboration with the center's reformation restoration project continued, it became clear that IIIF could offer the means by which the two institutions could work together to create a collaborative research repository to undertake image-led research on a large scale. As a first step, Michael Appleby, former head of it at the YCBA and now director of software engineering at Yale University Library, built a restricted access research space for reformation restoration. The National Portrait Gallery supplied all the Making Art in Tudor Britain images through a triple IIIF server hosted by Cogapp, because the gallery, did not until does not have its own IIIF server. And while the Reformation to Restoration team supplied all their images. As you can see here that the types of images range from high resolution photographs taken in studio conditions to snapshots from phones and scans of black and white images from photo archives, and bringing images together from so many different sources, of course raises the very large question of copyright. So only the project team at the two institutions had access. And this question of copyright raised by the digitization of large collections of images is being examined by the PHAROS Consortium, for photographic archives, and the Paul Mellon Center published a report on the issues around this last autumn. In the context of the Tudor projects, the pilot research space demonstrated the value of IIIF, starting from the really incredibly basic ability to be able to search using richer metadata, so shown here for an example of bringing together a group of portraits of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, organized by sitter. We could of course, as you'll be all familiar with, bring the works into dialogue with each other with capacity to zoom and annotation, such as these four portraits. Bring works in from other collections, and also examining images associated with a single work at the same time. So these are the Making Art in Tudor Britain images of two portraits, Robert Dudley in the National Portrait Gallery's collection. And so, there was, and remains, much work to do to create a comprehensive dataset with the reliable metadata necessary to underpin an image-led research resource. And Tudor portraiture is still comparatively under researched, and work is needed on all the foundational image of identification, attribution, dating of portraits, as well as the object specific information relating to measurement, provenance, collection, and copyright. And so for the past two years, the gallery and the YCBA have been working with a postdoctoral research associate, Dr. Hannah Lee, funded by the Paul Mellon Center to expand and refine the dataset, mainly using the resources of the Heinz photographic archive at the gallery, and I show you here an example of one of the set of boxes for Thomas Cromwell, so you can see this is our repository for all the images in order to undertake this survey of surviving portraits, and alongside archival treasures of the Portrait Gallery, such as the Geoge Scharf notebooks, and all of these newly gathered images now sit on the National Portrait Gallery is internal OneDrive, accessible to the three project researchers myself, Hannah Lee and Edward Town at the YCBA. And so to give an example of the step-change in scale, Making Art in Tudor Britain survied 200 paintings in detail. The standard reference point of work the period from the 1960s, Sir Roy Strong's English Icon, published around 400 paintings, and we are now working with over 5000 paintings, with evermore detailed metadata contained within a spreadsheet. And I show here the portraits of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,  of which we now have 55 in the dataset. The survey still continues, Hannah is up to the letter F in the alphabetical series of boxes by surname. And what we hope to achieve over the course of this foundation project is to work through the process of making these images IIIF compliant with associated metadata, and using the process developed with Coggap for this, for the Yale pilot, and then to explore how to make it publicly accessible in the future, probably through the Heinz archive in the first instance. And this foundation project also offers the opportunity to develop a pilot demonstrator using the Tudor dataset. In order to gain a greater understanding of potential applications and future development needs, and crucially, to lower the bar for user engagement, because, as you saw in the first session, all sorts of opportunities are available, but I really want to know how I can use them. And so from a personal research perspective, one tool that I and the Tudor team would find incredibly useful is the ability to simply show images at relative scale. During a research project in the conservation studio,  this is always the first element that anybody comments on because it can be very much surprising when works are brought into the same space. But when images are presented as regular tiles within datasets, even when the metadata on dimensions is readily available, it's easy to overlook the significance of variation in scale. Tudor portraits, generally signpost their scale through composition, and without reading the dimensions, I'm sure many of us today could have to guess as to the relative sizes of this group of portraits, which are all associated with Master of the Countess of Warwick in the collections of Royal Museums at Greenwich, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate, and also the YCBA, and the Worcester Art Museum in America. But having the ability to easily see them at scale relative to each other, brings about questions about cost, commissioning, and display to mind, much more readily, which would of course be a value, whatever kinds of objects, a researcher wish to consider in relation to each other.

And of particular value to the Tudor project would be the ability to interrogate the use of face patterns to create multiple versions of portraits over time. And I show here, a rare surviving face pattern on paper, of Sir Henry Sidney by Elizabeth I's Sergeant Painter, George Gower, which was used by an artist in Gower's studio to create a portrait of the sitter years after the original commission. And if accurate scanning is an option that can easily be selected to view a large number of images, it would open up the opportunity to develop a means by which researchers could overlay differnt works in order to see how face patterns and whole compositions were reused over time. So as you can see in these examples of Robert Dudley again, the artist on the right till he had to adapt an existing pattern to accommodate a smaller panel that he'd been given, and so revised the gesture of the hand on the right. In the 16th century, the artists approached the challenge of image alignment and registration through the use of a grid revealed here in the portrait of Montacute house using infrared reflectography. And as we've seen overlay and registration options already exist as IIIF resources, and one of the questions addressed over the course of this project through the workshops and the demonstrator will be to consider which might offer the most accessible solution for researchers engaging with IIIF for the first time, or whether it's an area that needs further development. And the ability to overlay images within a viewer, of course, need to be accompanied by the ability to adjust the transparency in order to be able to identify variation between the two paintings. And so I leave you with images of the most common method by which we are currently able to compare versions of paintings; it involves tracing, milinex, and a skilled conservator with a very steady hand. So in this foundation project, we hope to really be able to lay the groundwork for a new method that could prove to be a valuable tool for research into a virtual National Collection.