INDIGO Graffiti Terminology Database

In the existing body of graffiti literature—both popular and scholarly—many attempts have been made to describe or structure graffiti-related terminology. The INDIGO Graffiti Terminology Database collects graffiti-related terms and their definitions as they appear in the glossaries, dictionaries and various controlled vocabularies consulted within project INDIGO.

This dataset currently holds 2134 definitions (1728 in English, 303 in German, 61 in French and 42 in Italian) from 48 sources, made available via:

a text-based *.txt file where all the values are tab-separated;

a Microsoft Office Excel *.xlsx spreadsheet file, which also provides extra information about the sources consulted.

Although the amalgamated terminology sources are, in one way or another, suboptimal to organise knowledge on graffiti terms, this dataset has helped shape INDIGO's Graffiti Thesaurus. In addition, it can be a useful resource for anyone who wants to compare how different authors define the same term. Future expanded versions of this dataset will also be incorporated into an SQLite database to enable easier interaction with—and control of—all the data. 

More information about the INDIGO Graffiti Thesaurus and the different ways to organise terms can be found in the paper: Schlegel, J., Carloni, M., Wogrin, S., Graff, A.M., Verhoeven, G.J., 2023. Making a mark—Towards a graffiti thesaurus, in: document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes. Proceedings of the goINDIGO2022 international graffiti symposium, Vienna, Austria. 11-13 May 2022. Urban Creativity, Lisbon, pp. 203–219. DOI: 10.48619/indigo.v0i0.710.