No source: created in electronic format.
Emblematica Online offers a rewarding site for exploration of the seismic shifts
in digital humanities from 1.0 to 2.0,
The international scholars who
cooperate as the OpenEmblem research group have created a vibrant model for
humanistic collaborative research, culminating in the international project
‘Emblematica Online,’
Emblematica Online and its OpenEmblem Portal allows for new levels of research surpassing that which was previously available in emblem scholarship:
The OpenEmblem portal has moved from generic digitization to customized, sophisticated digitization of a complex Renaissance genre consistent with high scholarly demands. The design and scope of Emblems 2.0 makes these Renaissance resources more interesting to a wide range of scholars who study the Renaissance from diverse and divergent perspectives.
While the current
researchers for Emblematica Online have gained experience in creating standard
formats for automated metadata exchange,
The panelists, all of whom have committed to the DH 2012 conference in Hamburg, will present the following aspects of humanities based research in the digital medium:
Mara R. Wade traces the culmination of the research through Emblems 2.0 and introduces as its key feature unique emblem identifiers. In addition to helping us present the whole-part relationship, the unique identifier reflects the forward vision of the emblem community to anticipate a time when researchers can include annotation functions such as ‘identical with’ or ‘similar to’ in textual and pictorial research. It creates an authoritative basis for expanding the portal for book emblems to the material culture of early modern Europe, enabling the future study of art forms where emblems feature prominently. The unique identifier is a significant scholarly step in emblem scholarship and shows how community driven research serves larger scholarly communities as well.
Thomas Stäcker demonstrates how the project sets digital emblematics to work, focusing on practical issues of sharing, and the distribution and mining of emblem metadata and data. Future digital emblem research, in particular, and digital humanities, in general, must achieve more integrated systems grouping resources together, making them available through uniformly designed graphical interfaces and allowing searches on standardized fields and vocabulary. Emblematica Online established a common format for indexing digital emblem material. Staecker emphasizes 1) the development of a particular XML-schema with a separate emblem namespace based on standards such as TEI, METS MODS, and SKOS; 2) how data originating from different international projects are shared and distributed, e.g. via OAI; and 3) how emblems and theirs parts may be reliably identified and quoted by persistent identifier by means of a central handle service at the University of Illinois.
Two papers focus on image indexing and its broad potential for the digital humanities.
Regine Stein demonstrates how the issuing of a unique identifier at the level of the individual emblem opens emblem studies up for cross-domain research and discusses the Linked Data approach. She argues that the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (ISO 21127, CIDOC-CRM) provides the ‘semantic glue’ necessary to mediate between different sources of cultural heritage information and thus provides the mechanism to open emblem metadata to cross-domain research from both the text and the image research communities, including material culture, such as prints, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and even architectural ornament. Based on the emblem schema, it is worth exploring a Linked Data implementation using the CIDOC-CRM. Because we aim also for maximum compliance to widely used authorities and controlled vocabularies such as Iconclass, Emblematica Online can offer a best practice case in terms of linking different sources instead of building data silos.
Hans Brandhorst presents the
advantages of Iconclass as a shared vocabulary tool demonstrating that it has a
vital role to play in making visual information accessible and retrievable.
‘Meaning’ is not an intrinsic quality of a picture, and cannot be detected with
image recognition techniques (alone). Non-trivial subject retrieval of visual
sources is impossible without rich textual metadata. A classification as a tool
for the production of metadata can only survive in the distributed environment
of the internet if it functions as a flexible, central webservice, and if the
user community itself can correct, edit and expand the vocabulary. He discusses
Iconclass 1) as a data production tool; 2) a shared vocabulary tool, open to
community editing; 3) as an information retrieval tool; and 4) as Linked Open
Data in SKOS/RDF and JSON representations. He ends with a discussion of arkyves as a mixed business model to sustain Iconclass
development.
David Graham outlines Emblems 3.0. It
can be argued that our earliest efforts were primarily aimed at gaining
individual access to digital data that minimally replicates the books comprising
our corpus, and in particular at creating ways to digitize, store, and display
visual content. The second phase was about making collaborative access possible
by ensuring interoperability and independence from particular vendors and
platforms. It now seems clear that the third phase will have as its primary
focus the goal 1) of massively, pervasively, and permanently interconnecting huge amounts of textual and visual data and metadata
in multiple forms, contexts, and purposes, 2) of integrating materials from a wide diversity of sources, and 3) of
enabling collaboration and interaction – both among scholars and between the scholarly and lay communities – on an
unprecedented scale.
In the spirit of the emblem itself with its visual and textual components, Emblem 3.0 will be interactive and collaborative; it will extend to emblems in material culture. Emblem 3.0 will open up heretofore unanticipated qualitative research questions based on well curated and designed quantitative digital resources.