It is intended to replace both http://schema.org/Painting and http://schema.org/Sculpture (and http://schema.org/Photograph when it is being used to describe photographs in an artistic context rather than photojournalism, snapshots, etc.)

My desire to create a new Schema.org type for artwork came about because of my annoyance with the limited vocabulary in the currently available types (most notably, the lack of a “type” for visual artforms other than painting, sculpture, and photography, such as printmaking,  drawing, collage, assemblage, digital art, etc.).

I should state that this is just an idea of mine – it is not an accepted Schema.org type and so should not be used on a production website!

However I will soon be posting have just posted it on the public-vocabs mailing list to see if it has enough support to be considered.

Thing > CreativeWork > VisualArtwork

As mentioned above, this is a rough second draft. Any comments, additions, and criticisms, are much appreciated!

Yes, the act is badly thought out, and as a visual artist who puts images of his work up on the web I’m reading a lot about it, and I am concerned.

But—as mentioned in Techdirt—it’s worth pointing out that (my emphasis in bold):

“Under the Government’s plans, organisations that wish to use orphan works would have to conduct a ‘diligent search’ for the owner of orphan works before they could use the material. The searches would have to be verified as diligent by independent authorising bodies. In addition, organisations would have to pay a “market rate” to use orphan works so as rights holders could be recompensed for the use of the works if they were later identified.”

— Out-law.com

So, a company can’t just claim it did a diligent search (i.e. it didn’t bother) because the search needs to be “verified as diligent by independent authorising bodies”. Obviously there’s a worry that the “independent authorising bodies” will be toothless and in the pockets of big corporations, but this remains to be seen.

And if the real copyright holder of the image is identified after the image has been used (i.e. after a diligent search that has been verified by an independent body failed to find the copyright holder) then the company that used the image has to retrospectively pay a “market rate” to the copyright owner.

So that would actually force companies who ‘steal’ artwork off the internet and use it to pay up. Hopefully (IANAL!) making it easier to get cash out of them than the traditional approach of suing them, which is not a viable financial possibility for most artists & photographers.

Given that the law has passed (it’s here, we need to deal with it), I think the two areas that artists & photographers should concentrate on are:

1. Ensuring the “independent authorising bodies” have enough independence—and teeth—to ensure that a diligent search is indeed diligent, and is not restricted to just running a search in a proprietary copyright-licensing database that artists/photographers have to pay to be included in.
2. Ensuring that the “market rates” that companies would be forced to pay retrospectively are indeed market rates and not insultingly small token payments.

This is my first draft of an idea of how to mark up artwork using Schema.org. It is intended to replace both http://schema.org/Painting and http://schema.org/Sculpture (and http://schema.org/Photograph when it is being used to describe photographs in an artistic context rather than photojournalism, snapshots, etc.)

My desire to create a new Schema.org type for artwork came about because of my annoyance with the limited vocabulary in the currently available types (most notably, the lack of a type for printmaking and drawing).

I should state that this is just an idea of mine – it is not an accepted way to use Schema.org markup and so should not be used on a production website!

Thing > CreativeWork > Artwork

As mentioned above, this is a very rough, off-the-top-of-my-head, first draft. Any comments, additions, and criticisms, are much appreciated!

Given that there are strong differences of opinion over whether RDFa or Microdata is the best/correct way to add semantic markup, I’ve decided to take a neutral position and demonstrate both technologies.

Thanks go to Manu Sporny’s simple guide on how to implement RDFa Lite for schema.org vocabularies which showed me how easy it was to implement RDFa Lite.

OK, let’s start

Schema.org provides a Painting type at http://schema.org/Painting so let’s start with that:

Basic markup

OK, here’s the basic HTML. I’m using HTML5 and I’m putting the entire piece of artwork inside an article element – your page structure may be different.

<article>
  <h1>Mona Lisa</h1>
  <img alt="the painting of the Mona Lisa" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg/164px-Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg" width="164" height="240" />
  <p>Painted in 1506.</p>
  <p>© 1506< by Leonardo da Vinci.</p>
</article>

(Yes, I know that a painting made in 1506 is now out of copyright – it’s just an example!)

Microdata version:

<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Painting">
  <h1 itemprop="name">Mona Lisa</h1>
  <img itemprop="image" alt="the painting of the Mona Lisa" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg/164px-Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg" width="164" height="240" />
  <p>Painted in <span itemprop="dateCreated">1506</span>.</p>
  <p>© <span itemprop="copyrightYear">1506</span> by <span itemprop="copyrightHolder">Leonardo da Vinci</span></p>
</article>

To check that your microdata is valid, copy and paste the HTML above (or your own modified HTML) into Google’s Rich Snippets testing tool at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets.

RDFa Lite version:

<article vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Painting">
  <h1 property="name">Mona Lisa</h1>
  <img property="image" alt="the painting of the Mona Lisa" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg/164px-Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg" width="164" height="240" />
  <p>Painted in <span property="dateCreated">1506</span>.</p>
  <p>© <span property="copyrightYear">1506</span> by <span property="copyrightHolder">Leonardo da Vinci</span>.</p>
</article>

To check that your RDFa is valid, copy and paste the HTML above (or your own modified HTML) into the RDFa Play testing tool at http://rdfa.info/play/.

So what was all that about, then?

Well, in both versions I’ve added properties to the surrounding article element to tell anything parsing this HTML that it uses the vocabulary at http://schema.org/ – specifically that at http://schema.org/Painting and therefore it contains details about a painting.

The h1 element containing the name of the painting is given an attribute that defines it as the name of the painting. For Microdata this is done by giving it an itemprop attribute with a value of “name” and for RDFa Lite it is given a “property” attribute with a value of “name”.

Similarly the img element is given an additional property to indicate that it’s an image of the painting.

The HTML elements themselves don’t matter – you could use a definition list, which might be easier if your data is coming out of a database:

<dl>
  <dt>Artist</dt>: <dd property="copyrightHolder">Leonardo da Vinci</dd>
  <dt>Date</dt>: <dd property="dateCreated">1506</dd>
  <dt>Copyright Date</dt>: <dd property="copyrightYear">1506</dd>
</dl>

Adding in more information

Typically we’d also want to add in the artist’s name, maybe with a link to a page about the artist. On your own site this would be a link to your artist’s statement or “bio” page, but for this example I’ll use the Wikipedia page on Leonardo da Vinci. The basic HTML would be simple:

<p>By <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci">Leonardo da Vinci</a>.</p>

The http://schema.org/Painting page provides a creator property, but unlike the basic text properties we’ve used so far, the creator property is actually a whole new schema type – http://schema.org/Person.

Since the information about the artist (apart from their name) will be on a separate page, we’re just going to link to that page in a way that clearly indicates that the page about the artist and the page about the artwork are connected. The “about the artist” page should be marked up using http://schema.org/Person – I’ll probably write a post about how to do that at a later date.

In both Microdata and RDFa Lite it is essential that the snippets below are located inside the over-arching article element.

Microdata version

<p itemprop="creator" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
  By <a itemprop="url" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci">
      <span itemprop="name">Leonardo da Vinci</span>
    </a>.
</p>

RDFa Lite version

<p property="creator" typeof="Person">
  By <a property="url" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci">
      <span property="name">Leonardo da Vinci</span>
    </a>.
</p>

My gripe with schema.org

One of things that annoys me most about Schema.org for artwork is the limited vocabulary. There are plenty of properties available that I haven’t used in the examples above, but it’s the lack of specific properties that are very commonly used to describe paintings and other artwork, most notably the dimensions and the materials. These two pieces of information are commonly found in any exhibition catalogue or art book.

It’s obviously something which also annoyed the Indianapolis Museum of Art – so much so that they just went ahead and invented several new properties for http://schema.org/Painting and used them on their website. If you view the HTML source of a random page on their website you can see something like this:

<div class="<a>mercury-mdd mdd-materials</a>">
  <span class="<a>name</a>">Materials</span> <div class="<a>value</a>" itemprop="<a>materials</a>">oil on canvas</div> 
</div>
<div class="<a>mercury-mdd mdd-dimensions</a>">
  <span class="<a>name</a>">Dimensions</span> <div class="<a>value</a>" itemprop="<a>dimensions</a>">39 x 53 1/2 in.</div> 
</div>

A lot of things on the web tend to become official if enough people adopt them, so I’m going to adopt their use of materials and dimensions properties, and add them into our example HTML.

Microdata version

<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Painting">
  <h1 itemprop="name">Mona Lisa</h1>
  <img itemprop="image" alt="the painting of the Mona Lisa" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg/164px-Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg" width="164" height="240" />
  <p>Painted in <span itemprop="dateCreated">1506</span>.</p>
  <p>© <span itemprop="copyrightYear">1506</span> by <span itemprop="copyrightHolder">Leonardo da Vinci</span></p>
  <p itemprop="creator" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
    By <a itemprop="url" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci">
        <span itemprop="name">Leonardo da Vinci</span>
      </a>.
  </p>
  <p><span itemprop="materials">Oil on poplar</span>, <span itemprop="dimensions">77 cm × 53 cm (30 in × 21 in)</span></p>
</article>

RDFa Lite version

<article vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Painting">
  <h1 property="name">Mona Lisa</h1>
  <img property="image" alt="the painting of the Mona Lisa" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg/164px-Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg" width="164" height="240" />
  <p>Painted in <span property="dateCreated">1506</span>.</p>
  <p>© <span property="copyrightYear">1506</span> by <span property="copyrightHolder">Leonardo da Vinci</span>.</p>
  <p property="creator" typeof="Person">
    By <a property="url" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci">
        <span property="name">Leonardo da Vinci</span>
      </a>.
  </p>
  <p><span property="materials">Oil on poplar</span>, <span property="dimensions">77 cm × 53 cm (30 in × 21 in)</span></p>
</article>

Ideally the materials could be split into medium and support, and dimensions would specify which measurement is width and which is height, but…

The Dream

Imagine a Google Image Search where a potential customer could search for contemporary artwork that is available for sale in a specific price range which is no larger than a specific size (the right size to fit on the wall in their new living room) – and have your artwork come up in the search results.

Imagine a Google Image Search where an art student or academic could search specifically for woodcuts created between 1550 and 1700 matching certain keywords – and get accurate results.

The Problem

I’ve been thinking recently about the semantic web and artwork, or more specifically: “what’s the best way to markup artwork in HTML so that third parties such as search engines can best understand what my web page is about.”

Personally I don’t care whether the semantic markup is achieved through HTML5 microdata or RDFa Lite, so long as it doesn’t involve me having to doing anything other than output HTML with specific properties and values.

Schema.org

I’ve been looking at schema.org, which is supported by the major search engines, and they have http://schema.org/CreativeWork which has three relevant sub-types: painting, photograph, and sculpture.

They all seem a bit basic, though – for example, for a painting there is no way to semantically markup the dimensions or painting type (oil, acrylic, watercolour, etc) – both of which are fairly important and commonly recorded properties of any painting.

And printmaking and drawing (amongst other media) are not represented at all.

If Not Schema.org, then what?

So I’ve looked around for some other vocabularies, and there are some around but they don’t really fit my criteria.

There are a variety of metadata formats for the arts, but many rely on producing separate XML files of semantic data, rather than just marking up your web pages semantically. As a web developer this rings alarm bells because it breaks the principle of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself!), and it also doubles the amount of work you need to do – not a good thing for a busy artist with limited time.

So, I went back to first principles, and made a short list of what my ideal semantic markup would be:

• It must be open and free to use
• It must be easy to implement as either HTML5 microdata or RDFa Lite.
• It must be something that major search engines are likely to adopt (I’m not doing this for fun or from some utopian dream of the semantic web!)
• It must have a rich vocabulary that allows fine classification of artwork
• It must be valuable for artists, galleries, museums, and aggregators (e.g. search engines)

OK, back to Schema.org

All of which took right back to Schema.org. It’s free to use, it can be implemented in either HTML5 microdata or RDFa Lite, it’s already supported by the search engines – that’s the first three criteria met.

However, as stated above, it doesn’t have a rich vocabulary that allows the fine classification of artwork (and it misses out printmaking and drawing completely), which reduces its value.

You can extend Schema.org but it would seem pointless doing this in isolation because Google and Bing aren’t going to suddenly adopt my extensions because I’ve invented them – I’m guessing it would need a certain critical mass of artists, galleries, museums, and universities adopting a set of schema.org extensions to make it worthwhile for search engines to support them.

A call for proposals, suggestions, or existing solutions

So I’m putting this out there to see if anyone else is struggling with the same issue and wants to collaborate on either a small number of extensions to schema.org for various Creative Works to make them really useful for semantically marking up artwork in HTML (and likely to be adopted by artists, galleries, etc.), or alternatively if someone knows of an existing solution that meets my short list of criteria above.

Your comments, as always, are most appreciated.

Steve Lieber is a comic book artist. He drew Underground, a graphic novel (written by Jeff Parker, drawn by Steve, and colored by Ron Chan).  The story follows Park Ranger Wesley Fischer as she tries to save Stillwater Cave – and then has to save herself.

On Sunday (3 days ago, as of time of writing) a fan posted scans of every single page onto 4chan (EDIT: archive of the 4chan thread on Steve Lieber’s site), a well-known discussion forum.

Yup, all Steve’s work is now out there for free. Steve found out via a message on Twitter.

He didn’t go mad.

He didn’t call in the lawyers.

Instead he went to the forum and joined in the discussion:

Techdirt have a much-used phrase for this: “Connect with Fans“.

Yesterday Steve posted a blog post – Whole book for free; or learning from 4Chan – explaining what had been happening.

What happened next? Well, today Steve posted a graph of his sales of the very same comic book (which he sells on Etsy):

I don’t think that anything can really illustrate Tim O’Reilly’s argument that “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy” (and various other points in his seminal 2002 article) than Steve’s experience.

This has all happened in the past 3 days: a huge surge in sales thanks to “piracy”.

Steve Lieber is currently discussing this series of events on Warren Ellis’ WhiteChapel discussion forum if you’re interested to hear more of his experience and thoughts.

And you can buy Underground on Steve’s Etsy store.

I’m starting to wonder when we’ll see a “Dummies Guide to Getting Your Work Pirated” on the desk of every artist, writer, musician … and marketing executive.

One of the things that she and Warren Ellis are doing is using the various print-on-demand (should that be produce on demand?) services that have been around for some time. For example, they’ve set up a CafePress store to sell a variety of branded items along with the tongue-in-cheek “t-shirt of the week” (TOTW).

From Warren’s blog:

…Basically, we take some of the stupider things I’ve said on Twitter and elsewhere, often in a state of extreme alcoholic refreshment or severe sleep deprivation, and put them on a t-shirt. Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, once a week, here we are.

Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night — midnight UK time, more often than not. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

Ariana expands on the subject in her first blog post (which has since, sadly, disappeared from the web) about TOTW:

But the salient point here — just in case it’s not sticking out quite enough to stick you in the eye — is that it took no. time. at. all. to toss together a shop and a bit of fun. I cannot imagine that you’d have that hard a time of doing what-ever it is that’s been kicking around in your head. And, yes, it is totally fair for you to say “but I haven’t got 3billion followers on Twitter to tell about it…!” and it’s also quite fair to say “But MY fun side project involves supplies and an Etsy shop and will likely take FORTY minutes to set up.”
…
The thing of it is, you don’t need to be thinking “well how many of whatever would I have to sell to make it worth my blah blah blah” — you’ve just got to think “would I rather spend the next hour looking for neat stuff online, or would I rather, you know, make something neat. And maybe someone buys one, and that’s one more person noticing me than right this second. And also, hey, I get to make something!”

Both Warren and Ariana are enthusiastic proponents of the cause of getting off your backside and making something – not fussing about whether you have a 20-page marketing strategy document or an army of Twitter followers beforehand.

And this is most definitely the right approach. You need to make something first, then start getting it out there. It’s simply impossible to have an army of Twitter followers unless there’s a reason for them to follow you, and if you’re an artist/writer/musician then that means that you’ve got to have made your artwork/writing/music available – even if it’s only a few preparatory pieces or a demo or two.

Footnotes

1. FreakAngels itself is an interesting experiment (as well as being a damn fine graphic novel) in a business model that involves giving content away for free. It’s published online on a weekly basis, absolutely free of charge and accessible by everyone, and the graphic novel collections of these weekly strips are sold in the usual printed format (it’s important to state that the weekly online episodes remain online for free even after print versions have been published). I could probably dedicate an entire blog post to FreakAngels, and probably shall one day in the not-too-distant future.

As I’ve been working on The Book of the Erinyes I’ve been trying to work out who it’s likely to appeal to.

The problem is that it doesn’t fit comfortably in any one area. It sits between art and craft, between bookbinding and book art, between mainstream and underground. It’s art made in the interstices.

Personally I find interstitial art to be more interesting, but as an artist it makes it very hard to find existing markets in which to promote it.

When you’re trying to sell or promote artwork (or indeed anything) the first thing you need to understand is your potential audience, because this usually dictates how and where you market your artwork. There are many existing routes you can use if your work fits neatly into a genre or discipline, but if your work floats between established definitions then it’s far more difficult.

This chain of thought led me to the Interstitial Arts Foundation, which was founded by a group of literary, visual, musical, and performance artists for the purpose of developing and promoting interstitial art. There’s quite a lot to digest on their website, and I’ve only read a fraction of it so far, but I recommend it as a very interesting collection of ideas.

However I’m still left with the problem of how to get The Book of the Erinyes “out there” – how to raise awareness of it so that I can sell some copies of the limited edition handmade book and of the various other related artwork (I’m planning an unlimited paperback print-on-demand version, and various limited edition postcards, not to mention a free ebook version).

My personal view (and, please, if you have a different view, leave me a comment below) is that The Book of the Erinyes might appeal to two key audiences:

1. Book Arts/Bookbinding Arts – a more traditional arts audience, albeit still in a grey area between the more fine-art area of Book Arts & Artist’s Books, and the more craft-orientated area of Bookbinding. And of course it also involves Letterpress printing, which is another separate area!
2. Arty & Weird – this is my working name for a sub-cultural strand that seems to cross various boundaries, but can be broadly defined as those people who have an interest in art combined with one or more of the following interests:
   • graphic novels (particularly those by people like Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman, and the Hellblazer series),
   • goth or alternative music sub-culture,
   • films by David Lynch or Terry Gilliam,
   • books by the likes of Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, and Jeff VanderMeer.

   I promise I’ll try to think of a better name for this imperfectly-defined audience – if one already exists please let me know!

So, having worked out who I think might be interested in The Book of the Erinyes I now have to find ways to reach them.

And this is where you, dear reader, come in. I’m soliciting suggestions and ideas as to how to reach my target audiences. Please leave a comment on this same post on The Book of the Erinyes website if you have any ideas.

(Comments closed on this as it is a cross-posting – please post your comments on the original article)

One commenter, Kevin Stapp, sums it up perfectly:

The more I hear about ‘new business models’ for musicians the more I’m reminded of a very old business model: patronage. Throughout much of history artists (painters, composers, sculptors, etc.) were supported by patrons who commissioned the artist’s work. Some of the greatest works of Western art (think Sistine Chapel) were created at the behest of a rich patron. The unique aspect of the patronage model is the patron commissioned the artist to create something out of a true appreciation for art itself. There wasn’t any real intention to take financial advantage by reselling the work. Patrons paid for art for the art’s sake alone.

Amanda Palmer’s efforts to connect with fans is a sort of crowd-sourcing patronage model. These ‘fans’ are really just patrons of the art Amanda Palmer creates. Rather than find one patron to support your art you find 50 or 100 or more. Like the rich patrons of history the fans aren’t interested in profiting from the artist they support; they simply appreciate the art itself. It will be interesting to see if the patronage model supplants the commercial profit model for music.

This Crowd-Sourced Patronage model, as Kevin dubbed it, seems to draw together a lot of the strands of thought that have emerged in the past few years – Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans”, the “Freeconomics” ideas discussed by a multitude of people, and multi-way open communication between fans and creators (as opposed to press releases).

So what are the basic features of Crowd-Sourced Artistic Patronage?

1. Build a base of true fans

This is the foundation of everything. Your “true fans” are your patrons and without them you won’t succeed.

Kevin Kelly’s seminal post 1000 True Fans describes how an achievable number of fans can provide the financial support an artist needs (note: as Kevin mentions, it doesn’t have to be 1000).

You need to work hard to get—and keep—these fans.  And this hard work should be fun.  Again, quoting Amanda Palmer:

i started my band in 2000. we didn’t play rock clubs. we played in our friends houses, in our own houses, in art galleries, in lofts, at parties. then we gradually brought the party indoors, into clubs that would book us once they knew we’d bring in 50 drinking/paying bodies. i treated our email list like gold. i obsessively stayed up all night and added named after every show. we took the time to meet every single fan who wanted to meet us after every show … but this wasn’t because i felt it was mandatory…i did this because we LIKED it.

2. Free-up the abundant, charge for the scarce

If a component of your work is freely reproducible and freely distributable, then don’t try to restrict or control it.  For a visual artist this might include digital reproductions of your artwork (the images on your website).

Artists often talk of people “stealing” their images.  When they say this, they don’t mean that people are breaking into their studios and making off with their canvases.  They mean that someone has downloaded an image from their website.

I’ve blogged about this before in more detail.  I know it’s an emotive issue with some artists, who argue furiously against letting people freely distribute digital reproductions of your artwork at no cost to you, potentially bringing you more new (paying) fans for your real artwork.  However I’ve never heard a good business reason why an artist should try to restrict this free marketing.

My position is this: the digital reproductions of an artist’s work are the legal property of an artist (unless they sell the rights on). I’ve never argued against that legal position. However, I have taken the business decision to allow—and encourage—anyone to download and freely distribute the digital images of my artwork as I think this is a good thing, both for me as an artist and for my potential customers (my 1000 true fans).

Meanwhile I continue to work on my actual (non-digital) artwork, for which I will be charging money. I’m charging for this component because it’s scarce, and not digitally reproducible at little or no cost. If you want to read more about what exactly I’m doing (including what I’m charging for and what I’m giving away) then I’ve covered it in more detail here.

3. Continually engage with people who like your work

Keep your lines of communication open, and actively encourage—and facilitate—a dialogue between you and your potential customers. Don’t rely on them to come to you (and your website) – go out and connect using toolls like Twitter.

If you have any feedback I’d be really interested to hear it.