The Karel van Mander Academy is a group of scholars who offer ready to use guidelines for the description of art, architecture, and develop conceptual frameworks for cataloguing works of art and other cultural objects. By offering project consulting we support the thoughtful application of digital tools and methodologies to humanistic inquiry. We promote (digital) research across all arts and humanities disciplines. We are are interested in how the use of digital tools is transforming scholarship in the humanities. As a study group we are very concerned with the cultural and social impact of the rapid development of new media for the humanities. We not only actively mediate between computing and humanities, but also strive for the preservation and survival of existing research methods and classification models by integrating them in digital environments. We make a clear distinction between the actual cultural objects (and phenomena) and their digital ‘shadows’, images or descriptions which tend to represent them as nothing more than an outline of a single entity. A two-dimensional digital representation can never replace a real and multi-faceted object, and an unclear distinction between the two could lead to confusing and inaccurate research. Hence we try to define the complex relationships amongst cultural objects and works of art, their resprentations, contexual backgrounds, as well as between objects and places, people and artistic milieus and movements (artists, partrons, art critics and theorists, cultural entrepreneurs). We aim to provide easy and sustainable access for scholars to all kinds of resources of (digital and analog) data in the humanities by developing much-needed data resources and advanced tools to discover, explore, analyse, interpret, annotate, or combine them. Our purpose is to strengthen research, education and communication in the fields of the Arts, Cultural Heritage and the Digital Humanities.