Here’s the good news.
There are a lot of Search Terms…
The TATE has used a relatively expansive list of subjects to organize a prominent subject search capability for all the works in its online collection. According to the site there are 66,062 works of art by 3,075 artists in the collection, “every work in the Collection has its own online information page,” and “the majority are illustrated, though this is not always possible due to copyright restrictions.”
Main Subject List. The Tate.
The Terms Organized Hierarchically…
The subject search option is prominently displayed on the home page of the collection along with the simple and advances search options. In addition to a standard text search box, the subjects are presented an expandable list of 16 main categories, as shown on the left, for browsing. There are (by my count, which could be off) 155 second level subcategories. Each of these subcategories is further divided into between 2 and 100 or more subcategories of its own. There are too many for me to count all of them, and unfortunately the TATE does not choose to allow you to peruse them in alternate ways. It is hard to estimate the total because the range is so great. The main category Abstraction, for instance, has a total of only 10 ultimate sub-categories, whereas Architecture has 326 (ranging from Abbey to Zoo.) Under the main category People, however, there are 1068 names in the single third level subcategory of portraits:male. I can’t even make a guess as to the total number when these proper names are taken into account. A conservatively estimate of general subject categories is 4,000 or so. It is evident that the Tate has created a pretty substantial subject matter breakdown. [click to continue…]
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