Harriet M. Sonne de Torrens

Academic Librarian, Visual Resource Specialist, manages the Visual Resource Library in the Department of Visual Studies, and Collection Development in Cinema, Art History and Visual Studies, UTM. I am a member of the Research Council at the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.

Medievalist / Art Historian (specializing in 12th-13th century iconography, Baltic and Scandinavia studies, and the historical production of baptismal fonts). Founder and co-director of Baptisteria Sacra Index: An Iconographical Index of Baptismal Fonts from the Early Christian to the 17th century, see https://bsi.dhn.utoronto.ca/ and https://eadh.org/projects/baptisteria-sacra-index.

Baptisteria Sacra Index (BSI) is an international iconographical index of baptismal fonts with photographs of their settings from the early Christian period to the seventeenth century for scholarly research. BSI is affiliated with the Digital Humanities Network at the University of Toronto in Canada.

The BSI digital humanities research project is a permanent work-in-progress. The BSI project researches, collects and catalogues information on individual baptismal fonts and their liturgical settings. We aim to complete the following information for each font registered in BSI: date of font (year, century, style or period), geographic location, church (GIS location), medium, dimensions, workshop or artist, cognate fonts, pictorial subjects and decorative motifs, location codes of placement of motifs/subjects, inscriptions (language, location, text, source), drainage systems, lids (date of lid, apparatus, medium) and published scholarship on each font.

As of August 2023 the BSI database has documented:

Font Records: 24,800 +
Digital Images: 130,000 + (fonts, settings and contexts, churches (exterior and interior))
Inscriptions: 1,640 + (Arabic, Danish, Dutch, English, Old English, Flemish, French and Norman-French, Greek, Gaelic, Old German, Old Armenian, Italian, Latin, Runes, Spanish, Swedish, Nahuatl glyph, )
Bibliographic references about fonts: 3,409 +