Associated Products
Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe
Author: Nancy L. Wicker
Abstract: The aim of Project Andvari, supported by a Digital Humanities Start-up Grant from the NEH, is to provide a free digital portal for integrated access to dispersed collections of northern European art and artifacts of the early medieval period (4th–12th centuries). The project was conceived by Lilla Kopár of The Catholic University of America (CUA) and I, in collaboration with Worthy Martin and Daniel Pitti of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia, who are coordinating the technical specifications of the project. In 2013, we convened an international workshop for humanities scholars, museum professionals, and technology experts from Germany, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States to refine the conceptual design of the proposed research tool and identify its technological requirements in preparation for a pilot project. We initiated partnerships with The British Museum and the National Heritage Board of Sweden to aggregate data from their digital collections. In 2014, we held a small workshop of content specialists in medieval art and archaeology, library and information science specialists, and technology experts to lay the foundations of a project-specific thesaurus of iconographical subjects for the Andvari portal. Our next step is to create a working pilot portal that will allow semantic searching. Ultimately, Project Andvari will facilitate interdisciplinary research in art, archaeology, history, and literary and religious studies of the northern periphery of medieval Europe, allowing users to study visual culture across media and beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries.
Date: 04/10/2015
Conference Name: University of Mississippi Research Day
Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe
Author: Nancy L. Wicker
Abstract: Project Andvari is an international collaborative project designed to create a digital portal that will provide integrated access to collections of northern European art and artifacts of the fourth through twelfth centuries. The project title Andvari evokes many features of this new research tool. Andvari (Old Norse ‘the careful one’) is the name of a dwarf in Norse mythology, where dwarves are associated with arts and crafts. Andvari is the collector of a great treasure and a shape-shifter. Thus his character echoes the idea of a digital portal functioning as an aggregator and its utility in searching artistic elements transformed across media, regions, and cultures.
The goal of this presentation is to explain the rationale for and the objectives of Project Andvari. Despite the wealth of the surviving visual culture from early medieval Scandinavia and neighboring areas, primary materials are often difficult to access, scattered in specialized, national collections. Researchers working on artifacts in one medium are often unaware of parallels in another and use different terminology to describe similar elements. Recently, several collections of material restricted by medium, object type, or location have been made available through online catalogues, but these subsets have remained unconnected. Furthermore, the search functions of existing databases are often limiting since they pre-structure material in conventional categories dictated by scholarly traditions.
In response to these challenges, Project Andvari will facilitate interdisciplinary research in the northern periphery of medieval Europe, allowing users to study visual culture across media and beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries.
Date: 03/14/2014
Conference Name: Yale Baltic and Scandinavian Studies Conference
Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe
Author: Nancy L. Wicker
Author: Lilla Kopár
Abstract: Project Andvari is an international collaborative project designed to create a free digital portal that will provide integrated access to collections of northern European art and artifacts of the early medieval period.
The project title Andvari, which means ‘the careful one’ in Old Norse, is the name of a dwarf in Norse mythology. Dwarves are associated with arts and crafts, and Andvari is the collector of a great treasure and a shape-shifter. His character echoes the idea of the portal functioning as aggregator, as well as the transformation of artistic elements across media, regions, and cultures.
Date: 10/04/2013
Conference Name: "Unconference" on Digital Humanities, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities/University of Maryland
THAT Camp CAA: Contolled Vocabularies and Aggregated Data (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: THAT Camp CAA: Contolled Vocabularies and Aggregated Data
Author: Nancy L. Wicker
Abstract: This is working session about “Controlled Vocabularies and Aggregated Data” at the THATCamp associated with the meeting of the College Art Association in 2014. The topic relates to our concerns for “Project Andvari” but also will be of wide interest to other scholars working with large databases of art historical material.
Date Range: 02/10/2014
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Lightning Round—Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Lightning Round—Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe
Author: Nancy L. Wicker
Abstract: Project Andvari is an international collaborative project designed to create a digital portal that will provide integrated access to collections of northern European art and artifacts of the fourth through twelfth centuries. The project title Andvari evokes many features of this new research tool. Andvari (Old Norse ‘the careful one’) is the name of a dwarf in Norse mythology, where dwarves are associated with arts and crafts. Andvari is the collector of a great treasure and a shape-shifter. Thus his character echoes the idea of a digital portal functioning as an aggregator and its utility in searching artistic elements transformed across media, regions, and cultures.
The goal of this presentation is to explain the rationale for and the objectives of Project Andvari. Despite the wealth of the surviving visual culture from early medieval Scandinavia and neighboring areas, primary materials are often difficult to access, scattered in specialized, national collections. Researchers working on artifacts in one medium are often unaware of parallels in another and use different terminology to describe similar elements. Recently, several collections of material restricted by medium, object type, or location have been made available through online catalogues, but these subsets have remained unconnected. Furthermore, the search functions of existing databases are often limiting since they pre-structure material in conventional categories dictated by scholarly traditions.
In response to these challenges, Project Andvari will facilitate interdisciplinary research in the northern periphery of medieval Europe, allowing users to study visual culture across media and beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries.
Date: 02/13/2014
Conference Name: College Art Association, Chicago, IL
Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe
Author: Nancy L. Wicker
Abstract: Project Andvari is an international collaborative project designed to create a digital portal that will provide integrated access to collections of northern European art and artifacts of the fourth through twelfth centuries. The project title Andvari evokes many features of this new research tool. Andvari (Old Norse ‘the careful one’) is the name of a dwarf in Norse mythology, where dwarves are associated with arts and crafts. Andvari is the collector of a great treasure and a shape-shifter. Thus his character echoes the idea of a digital portal functioning as an aggregator and its utility in searching artistic elements transformed across media, regions, and cultures.
The goal of this presentation is to explain the rationale for and the objectives of Project Andvari. Despite the wealth of the surviving visual culture from early medieval Scandinavia and neighboring areas, primary materials are often difficult to access, scattered in specialized, national collections. Researchers working on artifacts in one medium are often unaware of parallels in another and use different terminology to describe similar elements. Recently, several collections of material restricted by medium, object type, or location have been made available through online catalogues, but these subsets have remained unconnected. Furthermore, the search functions of existing databases are often limiting since they pre-structure material in conventional categories dictated by scholarly traditions.
In response to these challenges, Project Andvari will facilitate interdisciplinary research in the northern periphery of medieval Europe, allowing users to study visual culture across media and beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries.
Date: 04/06/2014
Conference Name: 27th Annual Field Meeting of Runologists, Oslo, Norway
Harvard University Runic Colloquium—Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: Harvard University Runic Colloquium—Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe
Author: Nancy L. Wicker
Author: Lilla Kopár
Abstract: Project Andvari is an international collaborative project designed to create a digital portal that will provide integrated access to collections of northern European art and artifacts of the fourth through twelfth centuries. The project title Andvari evokes many features of this new research tool. Andvari (Old Norse ‘the careful one’) is the name of a dwarf in Norse mythology, where dwarves are associated with arts and crafts. Andvari is the collector of a great treasure and a shape-shifter. Thus his character echoes the idea of a digital portal functioning as an aggregator and its utility in searching artistic elements transformed across media, regions, and cultures.
The goal of this presentation is to explain the rationale for and the objectives of Project Andvari. Despite the wealth of the surviving visual culture from early medieval Scandinavia and neighboring areas, primary materials are often difficult to access, scattered in specialized, national collections. Researchers working on artifacts in one medium are often unaware of parallels in another and use different terminology to describe similar elements. Recently, several collections of material restricted by medium, object type, or location have been made available through online catalogues, but these subsets have remained unconnected. Furthermore, the search functions of existing databases are often limiting since they pre-structure material in conventional categories dictated by scholarly traditions.
In response to these challenges, Project Andvari will facilitate interdisciplinary research in the northern periphery of medieval Europe, allowing users to study visual culture across media and beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries.
Date Range: 03/12/2016
Location: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Project Andvari: Tagging objects with Linked Open Data (Tasks and Task Runs) (Web Resource)Title: Project Andvari: Tagging objects with Linked Open Data (Tasks and Task Runs)
Author: Daniel Pett
Abstract: The Micropasts crowdsourcing application -- developed and maintained by the British Museum and partnering institutions -- provided an avenue through which the Project Andvari team could collect user data on the applicability and comprehensiveness of the draft iconographic thesaurus developed through the initial grant period. This data will be used to further refine the existing Andvari thesaurus to be used for iconographic description.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://crowdsourced.micropasts.org/project/andvari/tasks/exportPrimary URL Description: Link to Micropasts Data Centre, a web page managed by the British Museum that hosts the CSV- and JSON-formatted data collected through the Micropasts crowdsourcing application.
Project Andvari LOD: Initial Release (Computer Program)Title: Project Andvari LOD: Initial Release
Author: Daniel Pett
Author: Joseph Koivisto
Abstract: The Micropasts platform -- developed and maintained by the British Museum and affiliated partners -- allowed for Project Andvari to collect user insight into the applicability of our draft thesaurus resource to actual artifacts from the collections of the British Museum and the Swedish National Heritage Board. This app was developed primarily by the British Museum's Micropast project team under the guidance of Daniel Pett. Minor thesaurus-specific updates were contributed by Joseph Koivisto for the Andvari project team. The app was released in March 2015 and collected data through August. The source code was developed for a Pybossa-based crowdsourcing platform and is made available through Zenodo and GitHub without restriction.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.33171Primary URL Description: The primary URL is a link to the Zenodo DOI for the source code.
Secondary URL:
https://github.com/MicroPasts/projectAndvariLOD/tree/v1.0Secondary URL Description: The secondary link is the URL to the GitHub repository where the source code is housed.
Access Model: Open Access
Programming Language/Platform: The source code was develoepd for a Pybossa-based implementation. The programming languages used include JSON, Python, and HTML.
Source Available?: Yes
Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe. Project report. (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe. Project report.
Author: Lilla Kopár
Abstract: Project report about the initial stage of the newly funded collaborative digital initiative Project Andvari with an overview of project goals, a timeline of activities, and call for collaboration among scholars on concept development and design.
Date: 4/8/2013
Conference Name: RMMC Workshop: Runes, Monuments, and Memorial Carvings. University of Chester, UK.
Project Andvari: A Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe. Project report. (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Project Andvari: A Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe. Project report.
Author: Lilla Kopár
Abstract: Though material culture is widely recognized as a cornerstone of interdisciplinary Anglo-Saxon Studies, the physical remnants of Anglo-Saxon daily life are still, all too often, being analyzed by specialists working in isolation from one another. Recently, several online databases and catalogues have made subsets of these materials widely available, mainly in the form of digital resources focused on one particular medium, object type, or location. But in spite of the easy availability of such corpora of digital images and object descriptions, it remains difficult to connect them to one another, not only because of the disparate nature of the artifacts themselves, but also because we lack the unifying terminologies and descriptive schemas that would allow for comparisons across disparate artistic media, scholarly disciplines, and national and language boundaries.
Project Andvari [http://andvari.iath.virginia.edu] is an international collaborative project, funded by NEH, that proposes a solution to these challenges by creating a free digital portal that will provide integrated access to collections of northern European art and artifacts of the early medieval period (4th–12th centuries). The project has four main objectives:
• To offer integrated access to the existing but dispersed artifactual record of northern European art of the early medieval period;
• to augment and enhance existing data and metadata;
• to allow humanities scholars to study the aggregated material in an interdisciplinary fashion and to promote analyses of relationships (both of artifacts and of cultures); and
• to promptly disseminate information about new discoveries and provide a shared virtual workspace for researchers.
Date: 8/3/2015
Conference Name: International Society of Anglo-Saxonists Biannual Conference. University of Glasgow.
Linking the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe: Project Andvari (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Linking the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe: Project Andvari
Author: Lila Kopár
Abstract: Project Andvari is an NEH-funded international collaborative project designed to create a free digital portal that will provide integrated access to collections of northern European art and artifacts of the early medieval period (4th–12th centuries). The pilot (in progress) will aggregate data primarily from The British Museum, Norwich Castle Museum, and Kringla (Sweden). The current presentation will focus specifically on issues of metadata and related technical aspects of the project as a case study. The nature and structure of metadata for Andvari has been determined by researchers’ needs as much as by practical considerations. Decisions were based on an interdisciplinary conversation in which scholars of various fields stated what they envisioned such a resource would include; LIS practitioners offered recommendations on how to best meet user needs based on actual information seeking behavior; and information technology specialists provided insight into what would be possible, given technological constraints.
Date: 05/11/2015
Primary URL:
https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/30220Primary URL Description: A link to the University of Texas at Austin institutional repository holding of the summary proceedings for the "Linking the Middle Ages" workshop.
Conference Name: Linking the Middle Ages
Project Andvari: Facilitating access to disparate digital collections of medieval material culture of northern Europe through interdisciplinary collaboration (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Project Andvari: Facilitating access to disparate digital collections of medieval material culture of northern Europe through interdisciplinary collaboration
Author: Joseph Koivisto
Abstract: As digital repositories of medieval manuscripts and artifacts increasingly become a standard avenue of access and scholarship, many researchers desire the ability to collocate and compare related collections and objects across disparate repositories via aggregation initiatives. Project Andvari, an NEH- funded program, proposes to create an aggregate digital repository that will promote use of disparate collections of early medieval (4th-12th Century) Norse art and artifacts by providing unified discovery and access to several digital collections of bracteates, pictures stones, coins, and more. An investigation into the proceedings of the initial project meeting held in November 2013 reveals that the Andvari project approach establishes the foundation upon which a sustainable aggregate repository will be built. By highlighting the project goals and intended repository functionality, the Andvari platform model is shown to facilitate innovative digital scholarship of medieval Norse material culture by promoting novel comparative analyses of previously distributed objects. Additionally, an acknowledgement of the diverse disciplinary backgrounds of the initial project meeting participants illustrates the positive influence of brining the perspectives of medievalists, information technology specialists, and cultural heritage librarians to bear on the identification of conceptual scope, organizational approach, and technical feasibility. The final analysis of the Project Andvari initial project meeting concludes that the overall project objectives and the approach to planning, design and implementation will likely result in a digital aggregate repository that will promote digital scholarship and provide a useful model for future repository design and production.
Date: 08/14/2014
Primary URL:
http://www2.archivists.org/2014/schedule#.V6iN-fkrK00Primary URL Description: A link to the conference schedule listing the poster presentation.
Conference Name: Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting 2014
Controlled vocabulary enhancement through crowdsourcing: Project Andvari, Micropasts, and public quality assurance (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Controlled vocabulary enhancement through crowdsourcing: Project Andvari, Micropasts, and public quality assurance
Author: Joseph Koivisto
Author: Youngok Choi
Abstract: As part of Project Andvari, a digital humanities initiative to aggregate early medieval northern European artifacts, it was deemed necessary to develop a semantically structured iconographic thesaurus to properly describe the iconographic content of distributed artefactual collections from a variety of contributing institutions. Developed according to SKOS-methodologies through open-access platforms, the thesaurus will ultimately be integrated into the project platform and made available for distributed implementation and linkages to broadly adopted authorities. Despite a solid conceptual foundation, project members were concerned about the resource’s ability to properly describe resources based on domain-specific scholarly practices. With this in mind, the project team partnered with Micropasts – a crowdsourcing platform sponsored by the British Museum – in order to create a Pybossa-based crowdsourcing application through which researchers, graduate students, and the public could test the thesaurus by applying terms and concepts to digital objects collected from the British Museum and the Swedish National Heritage Board. In this poster, we will present the underlying concept behind the utilization of crowdsourcing approaches to perform initial testing of a controlled vocabulary resource, highlighting the benefits of bringing multiple subjective perspectives to quality assurance efforts. The poster will also discuss the development of the crowdsourcing application in collaboration with the Micropasts team. Finally, the poster will present initial findings of the crowdsourcing initiative, analyzing term usage and recommended concepts in order to determine both the usability of our thesaurus and the feasibility of our quality assurance approach. The poster will finally present actionable recommendations for future projects interested in implementing crowdsourcing approaches to authority record testing and enhancement.
Date: 08/18/2015
Primary URL:
https://archives2015.sched.org/event/45c7/research-forum-poster-controlled-vocabulary-enhancement-through-crowdsourcing-project-andvari-micropasts-and-public-quality-assurancePrimary URL Description: A link to the SAA annual meeting schedule that lists the poster presentation and abstract.
Conference Name: Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting 2015
Interdisciplinarity, authority, and the crowd: Bringing library science practices to innovative digital humanities endeavors (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Interdisciplinarity, authority, and the crowd: Bringing library science practices to innovative digital humanities endeavors
Author: Joseph Koivisto
Abstract: Ever increasing in their ubiquity, digital humanities initiatives seek to blend traditional humanities scholarship and technological solutions to produce new approaches to scholarship and materials. But what can library science practitioners bring to the table? Headquartered at the Catholic University of America, Project Andvari is a digital humanities initiative that seeks to promote research and access to early medieval Northern European material culture. Starting in late 2013, I joined the project team as both a project assistant and as a library science scholar. This poster covers the impact that interdisciplinary engagement has had on the project and discusses some of the project enhancements that have been inspired by LIS approaches. This poster will also discuss a unique project development: a crowdsourcing application that combines medieval studies, museum collections, and library science disciplines in the pursuit of refining authority controls.
Date: 06/05/2015
Primary URL:
http://http://lis.cua.edu/chimforum/Primary URL Description: A Link to the CUA CHIM forum homepage which features a schedule listing for this poster presentation.
Conference Name: Cultural Heritage Information Management Forum
Controlled Vocabulary Enhancement through Crowdsourcing: Project Andvari, Micropasts, and Public Quality Assurance (Article)Title: Controlled Vocabulary Enhancement through Crowdsourcing: Project Andvari, Micropasts, and Public Quality Assurance
Author: Youngok Choi
Author: Joseph Koivisto
Abstract: This paper presents an experimental approach of using crowdsourcing to test
controlled vocabularies for digital collections of cultural objects. For a digital humanities
initiative project, Project Andvari, which is intended to create a digital portal of early medieval
northern European artifacts, it was recognized that there was a need to develop a semantically
structured iconographic thesaurus to describe the iconographic content of distributed artefactual
collections from a variety of contributing institutions. This paper discusses a workflow of
planning and development process of controlled vocabularies for the project and a testing process
of the vocabularies to determine both the usability of controlled vocabularies and the feasibility of
quality assurance approach. This paper demonstrates an applicability of crowdsourcing in
developing controlled vocabularies.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://www2.archivists.org/proceedings/research-forum/2015/agenda#peerPrimary URL Description: A link to the Society of American Archivists' research forum peer-reviewed articles listings.
Secondary URL:
http://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/ChoiKoivisto-ResearchForumPaper2015.pdfSecondary URL Description: A direct link to the article hosted by the Society of American Archivists.
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Other
Periodical Title: Society of American Archivists Research Forum Proceedings
Publisher: Society of American Archivists
Andvari: A Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe (Web Resource)Title: Andvari: A Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe
Author: Worthy Martin
Author: Daniel Pitti
Abstract: This web portal serves as the initial home for the proposed Andvari platform. While this site is currently used primarily for hosting information on the project as it progresses, it will ultimately be used as the home for the aggregation portal to be produced during stage II of the project lifecycle.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://www.andvari.org/Primary URL Description: This is the primary URL for the Project Andvari site.
Project Andvari: Workshop Blog (Web Resource)Title: Project Andvari: Workshop Blog
Author: Joseph Koivisto
Author: Lilla Kopár
Abstract: The Project Andvari Workshop blog serves as a portal for sharing on-going project updates, shared resources for workshop preparation, general project information related to partners and planning, and other pertinent project information. Moving forward, this blog will be used to document the development of the Andvari portal and will keep interested parties informed of newly-formed partnerships and data availability.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
https://projectandvari.wordpress.com/Primary URL Description: This is the direct link to the home page of the Project Andvari: Workshop Blog.