Ornament : Design : Translation was seeded by Tianna Helena Uchacz‘s longstanding preoccupation with Marcus Gheeraert’s late 16th-century print series, the Passio Verbigenae. This series marries 13 prints of Christ’s passion with grotesque ornament designs, replete with scrollwork, strapwork, architectural fragments, and animal-vegetal hybrids. Significantly, the series is introduced by a title plate print that explains that the designs are useful for various particular types of artisan, including painters, goldsmiths, and textile workers.

From 2021–2022, with the support of a Faculty Research Fellowship from the Melbern G. Glasscock Center of Humanities Research at Texas A&M University, Uchacz began to collect instances of ornament print series from ca. 1540 to 1620 that are introduced by title pages. With a Technical Assistance Grant from Texas A&M’s Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) and assistance from Bryan Tarpley, creator of Corpora, a dataset studio for the Digital Humanities, Uchacz and her research assistants Katelyn Noble and Catherine Crawford organized these prints in a relational database, tracking publication info for the prints, creating transcriptions and translations of the texts, and linking the prints to authoritative URIs in the Getty Union List of Artist Names. Additionally, the database tracks the rhetorical devices and addressees (specific artistic professions, collectors) for each of the print series.

From 2022, O:D:T partnered with the Making and Knowing Project, led by Pamela H Smith at Columbia University, and Performant Software Solutions to serve as a case-study user for an expanded, open-access community version of EditionCrafter, an open-source digital edition publication tool, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. A small dataset from O:D:T, annotated by Uchacz and her research assistants Isabella Saliceti and Grace Callanan, was piloted as an image-heavy instance of an EditionCrafter use case.

In May 2024, Uchacz began working with Peter Oakley and Katharina Vones, both of the Royal College of Art in London, to begin experimental reconstruction efforts to understand issues in the translation of ornament prints into particular destination media.

From 2022–2025, with the support of an Arts and Humanities Fellowship from Texas A&M, Uchacz continued work on the O:D:T database and commissioned additional features from Performant to expand the IIIF image annotation features of FairCopy, and open-access image and text editing environment that dovetails with EditionCrafter, as well as additional filter and search functions for IIIF annotations in EditionCrafter itself.