The core of iconographic research is the description of the subject matter of images.
As Staale Sinding-Larsen once formulated it: “The central operation of research work, including its very conclusion, which can be nothing else than a possibly better formulation of problems, is and remains that of description.”
Accepting this premise means accepting that there is no viable distinction between “documentation” and “research”. There is no iconographic research without description; nor is there description without research. Descriptions can never be “complete” because every student of an image may look at it from a new angle and cut another facet on the descriptive diamond. A persistent problem of iconographic research, however, is that descriptions do not converge. Most often researchers start with a clean slate when describing an image, so new iconographic data are rarely mounted onto existing information. Understandable when catalogues, monographs and articles were all in print, but less so in a digitised environment.
The aim of bildGRID, therefore, is to support convergence by allowing image collections and subject metadata to accumulate.
See: S. Sinding-Larsen, Iconography and Ritual, A Study of Analytical Perspectives (Oslo, 1984), p. 41