Spinning, and spinning pictures from medieval times, still fascinate me. There's so many pictures of spinning women, so few pictures of spinning men, and there's still no clarity about how many of them are showing whorls or no whorls, how many of them have the distaff left or the distaff right, and what the spinning position and spinning methods are exactly.

One of my friends and colleagues and I arrived at the conclusion that a good, large database with annotated pictures might be helpful to shed some more light on the issue... so now we are thinking about how to do that in the background of our minds. One big step of the project will be to find a suitable tool for the annotation; we basically need a database that can handle pictures as well as text, and preferably one that we can collaborate on via the internet, so a server-based software would be perfect.

I've already started peeking into the resources at the DiRT Directory, which is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. There's a huge number of different tools there that are tagged under "images", but I haven't been through them in enough depth yet to see whether there is something suitable for us or not.

If you've used a database for annotating and analysing pictures (or small finds, that should work as well), which one did you use? Were you happy with it?