Emblem Literature: Digital Modelling of the Interrelationships between Texts and Images

Abstracts

Nuala Bennet, UIUC

Interoperability of Digital Emblematica Metadata using the Open Archives Initiative and other Schemas

The Digital Emblematica database at the University of Illinois uses a metadata format that is loosely based on the Dublin Core metadata schema. I will talk about the metadata fields that we are using and how they correspond to the Dublin Core field names. This is of particular interest as we harvest our metadata using the Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol. In addition, I will talk about other options we are investigating to export our metadata, such as exporting to XML and OCLC SiteSearch. Each of these options allows for interoperability of metadata and I will be discussing our initial plans to exchange metadata with the Herzog August Bibliothek.

Peter Boot, Utrecht

Beyond the Digital Edition: Tools for Emblem Research

Finally, emblem digitisation seems to be taking off. Twenty-five Years after the first symposia, large emblem corpora are being indexed, or fully digitised, and soon we may even have an emblem portal which allows concurrent searches in all of our collections.
No-one will doubt the importance of being able to search in well-described and well-indexed emblem databases. With these objectives now in sight, we may allow ourselves some thoughts about the next steps in digital emblem research.
I will argue that in these next steps we will see an integration of emblem research and the digital emblem book edition. Once we have a digital edition, we may begin to add user-defined keywords to the emblems in the editions. A sufficiently generic search interface will allow selection of emblems according to the categories thus defined. Similarly, we will want to add keywords to emblem fragments, or relate emblem fragments to fragments of (other) emblems. We'll want to use these digital annotations to select the emblems and the emblem fragments shown in response to queries. And finally (for now), we'll want to define meta-data for the keywords and relations we just added.
In my talk, I will show how RDF (Resource Description Framework), beyond its use in Dublin Core, may be used to accomplish the above. Once the necessary machinery is in place, we'll be able to hyperlink not just to emblems, but to emblem searches resulting in predefined result lay-outs, to dynamically generated lists of related emblems, or to any other selection. To make this clear, I will showcase the Public Indexing Feature (PIF) soon to be added to the Emblem Project Utrecht website. EPU-PIF will allow scholars external to EPU to build his/her own indexes to the EPU website, and to have these indexes used in selection and display of the emblems on the EPU site. I will suggest features like these may have far-reaching consequences for scholarly research and communication.

Hans Branthorst

Indexing Emblems with Iconclass

I would like to propose, whatever the selection may be, to index every picture at various levels of indexing depth. In that way I can show that indexing a picture can take five minutes, but can also cost you two hours. I will then compare the "costs and benefits" of different approaches.

David Graham, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Three Phases of Emblem Digitization: the First Fifteen Years, the Next Five

In 1988, at the annual convention of the Modern Languages Association in New Orleans, I gave my first paper on emblem digitization. When I showed a slide of a HyperCard stack containing the text and images from Guillaume de La Perrière’s Le Theatre des bons engins, those present gasped audibly. Simply having met the technical challenges posed by "getting the pictures into the computer", in other words, was enough of an accomplishment to provoke a reaction during the first phase of emblem digitization. The disappearance of the main technical obstacles because of near universal access to high-quality scanning and digital photography, large capacity disk storage units, platform-independent and vendor-independent software, and high bandwidth connections has subsequently allowed attention to focus on what may be called "second phase" issues concerned more with adoption of standards and common procedures than with merely technical issues.
In 1999, at the Munich International Emblem Conference, I suggested that ICONCLASS and XML could emerge as technical standards, and proposed that the Society for Emblem Studies create a digitisation working group to make recommendations on these and related issues. Thanks largely to the coordinating efforts of Alison Adams, Tony Bernat Vistarini, Sagrario López Posa and now of Mara Wade and Thomas Staecker, the necessary discussions have begun to bear fruit. As we reach agreement on technical standards (which now include not only text and image storage and tagging but metadata formats) and on selection of corpora for priority digitization, we will begin to enter a third phase of emblem digitization in which issues of buy-in, logistics and resourcing are likely to become ever more prominent.
Theoretical adoption of common standards and agreement on selection of corpora will be of little benefit unless we can secure the effective collaboration of emblem scholars, of libraries and of digital publishers. In this connection, we now need to think carefully about the audience for digital emblems, about interoperability and distribution, about how to link digital corpora and about the prospects and impact of the commercialization of electronic corpora as part of the need to finance our projects. These questions, in my view, will assume increasing prominence in the next phase of progress towards a truly digital global emblematic corpus.

Wolfgang Harms, Munich

An Appraisal from the Perspective of the User

An examination of a selection of current emblem websites (see also the paper by Tom Kilton below) with an evaluation of their results and the value of these sites for the user. What is offered to the user? What works? What doesn't? What is still to be desired? What would make these sites easier to use and more attractive to potential users?

Tom Kilton, UIUC

Emblematica Online: the User's Perspective

Web sites which provide access to emblem books are becoming as diverse as the emblems themselves in terms of the access they provide to scholars. While much has already been written about this fact, much remains to be said. From the resolution of the pictura to access points to metadata , these sites operative today vary greatly in the information which they offer. Users may thus be perplexed by the level of detail and points of access common to some sites but not to others. Furthermore, if these sites are to attract scholars beyond the community of emblematists, Web design must be clear and attractive, links from portals in other disciplines must be created, and explanatory introductions about emblematics provided.
An examination of three major sites (the Bavarian State Library, the University of La Coruña, and Penn State University, among others) reveals a wide variety of types of information rendered by each institution. It also confirms the necessity of international cooperation in the sharing of digitization standards. This all informs the question, what is the "user's perspective" in an increasingly inter-disciplinary world of scholarship. (Please see also the paper by Wolfgang Harms above.)

Andrea Opitz, HAB

Indexing Emblem Books on the internet - what opportunities does TEI offer?

The demands on and limits of retrospective digitization of printed documents and their computer-aided publication have been discussed with growing interest during the past few years. In view of the fact that there are many isolated digitization projects - even in the field of old books - questions about homogenous indexing standards arise. What is the most suitable form of indexing, what sort of meta data may be applicable, how do global and specialized search engines find documents on the web, how can data about old books be administered, exchanged or even presented in the best possible way -these are the most important topics of this discussion. By now, XML (Extended Markup Language) has been established as the markup language for the internet, as has TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) in the domain of the humanities and social sciences. Set up with the goal to develop guidelines for encoding machine-readable texts of the Humanities, TEI has become the de facto standard for the text display of a wide range of text types. Although TEI in the first place was designed to mark up text, the TEI guidelines also allow the description and indexing of images. This is very important for the indexing of rare books, as we usually don't have machine readable digital texts, but image sequences which are put on the web. To what extent TEI is suitable for indexing electronically supplied old books, especially Emblem Books, will be described in the presentation. This report is based on the experience gathered from the Herzog August Bibliothek's digitization project Document Type Definitions zur Erschließung barocktypischer Gattungen im Internet (Document Type Definitions for the presentation and retrieval of early modern genres via the internet). Beyond the author/title and subject approach which you can find in every online-catalogue, it was tried to encode the structure of the Emblem Books and content of the Emblems so as to create a terminological and structural basis for the web-based digital publication of this genre.

Dietmar Peil, Munich

Nobody 's perfect. Concerning Problem in Constructing an Emblem Database.

This presentation presents for further discussion various problems that arose during the course of research on the Munich emblem database. The following questions will be posed: What is an emblem book? What are the appropriate criteria for establishing a corpus of emblem books on the internet? How much data can one person use? The search interface for the Munich database. Do I know what I see—or do I see what I know? Problems of identification in the description of the picturae. How many emblems are in a picture? Problems of interrelatedness in complex emblematic structures. Where do I find the motto? Problems beyond the tripartite emblem structure.

Stephen Rawles, University of Glasgow

A Spine of Information Headings for Emblem-Related Electronic Resources

On investigation, it is immediately apparent that all the emblematic electronic resources currently available usually have certain core areas of information, while other areas vary from resource to resource, according to the contents and priorities of the works involved.
As the attractive options offered by, for example, the Open Archive Initiative become more feasible, it becomes increasingly important to agree the appropriate categories of information which any ‘harvesting’ would require for seamless access to the varied sets of data.
This presentation would distill current thought on the matter, and aims to enable discussion, in the hope of reaching consensus on the the basis from which to proceed. The ‘Spine’ of information, in draft form, is posted on the Web (at http://www.ces.arts.gla.ac.uk/html/research.htm) and will be updated before the Wolfenbüttel meeting. In the meantime all ideas and intimation of relevant developments would be gratefully received, at either of these addresses:
Stephen.Rawles@btinternet.com
S.Rawles@hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk

Sagrario López Poza,Ángeles Saavedra Places, Universidad de La Coruña-Spain

A System for Integrated Access to Digital Libraries

There has been much effort recently exerted on the creation of digital libraries containing antique documents, in order to preserve our cultural heritage and to provide a broader access to them, as they are very valuable sources of information. However, these digital libraries are isolated one from another. This work presents a system, based on the use of ontologies, to federate three existing digital libraries that contain documents from the Spanish Golden Age (16th-18th centuries). This federation will offer very valuable advantages to a wide community of researchers, who will be able to access three databases of historic documents through a unique entry point. The architecture of this system, as well as the design of its user interface, has some interesting characteristics that increase its scalability and the easiness of management of changes in the databases, thus making it very useful and adequate to federate any kind of document databases.

Beth Sandore, UIUC

Applying Standards to Our Best Advantage in Emblem Collection and Item-level Description, and Metadata Harvesting

The international emblem community has converged around the digitization of emblem books as an opportunity to embark on an open exchange and ongoing discussion of best practices and standards. The standards that are being focused on include those related to metadata creation, the use of vocabularies for subject and thematic access, protocols for interoperable searching across collections, and image capture quality and preservation. We are all working essentially with similar materials in a well-defined genre, but our local needs and our research perspectives on these collections may result in different approaches to access. This paper looks at current best (and emerging) practices in the work on collection-level and item-level description for digital collections. Based on my understanding of recent discussions in this community about developing a method to search across digitized emblem collections internationally, and my involvement with other projects focused on exposing metadata for diverse digital collections held by many institutions, it seems that some investigation is warranted in two areas: 1) How can discrete emblem digitization projects exchange content in diverse metadata schema about emblems and emblem books? 2) What are the most effective methods for exchanging information about our collections, their content, and the individual objects in those collections, regardless of the manner in which we have locally conceptualized our collections (metadata harvesting using the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting being one, but not the only model)? This type of work could be helpful both within the community of emblem scholars, but, perhaps equally important, knowledge of emblem collections and their content would increase awareness about the availability of digital emblematica to a broader community of scholars across diverse disciplines. There are a number of useful background readings on collection-level and item-level metadata creation, including the work of the UK’s Research Support Libraries Programme (An Analytical Model of Collections and their Catalogues, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/model/), and the work of the U. S Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) Digital Collections and Content Project (http://imlsdcc.grainger.uiuc.edu/resources.htm#CLD), which contains a resource page listing several useful background readings.

Thomas Stäcker, HAB

Transporting Emblem Metadata with OAI

The Open Archive Initative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) provides an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting and by now become a widely established standard for the exchange of metadata. The mandatory metadata set of OAI is Dublin Core, but OAI also supports other formats, because, as it is recognized in the OAI core document, each community is interested in using specific sets and formats that suit their needs and the types of data they handle. The paper will attempt to show how OAI works on the technical level and how it is suited to transport metadata on emblems. In addition, it will discuss the question of Emblem metadata exchange against the background of building up joint databases and the problems that may occur by establishing a general data format for different types of Emblems.

Mara R. Wade, UIUC

What is an Emblem Portal?

At the emblem digitization conference organized by Alison Adams in June 2001 in Glasgow, I first suggested developing an emblem portal and presented preliminary ideas about how the research team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) wanted to approach the issue. At the International Emblem Conference in 2002 in La Coruna, Spain, European colleagues discussed the establishment of an emblem portal providing access to our current digital projects, resulting in the working paper, “European Emblem Portal Discussion” by Peter Boot et al from October 2002. At the same conference Angeles Saavedra Places and Nieves Brisaboa Rodriguez presented technical suggestions and solutions for linking data from, and integrating access to, three libraries involved in the Spanish Literature of the Golden Age in the internet. In the Autumn of 2002, Thomas Staecker, HAB, and I received a TRANSCOOP grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to work jointly on the digitization of German emblem books. This generous funding is not only supporting the present confernce, but allowed the two research teams from UIUC (Nuala Bennet, Tom Kilton, Beth Sandore, Mara Wade) and the HAB (Thomas Stäcker, Andrea Opitz) to have an on-site research visit at the UIUC in February 2003. During the HAB-UIUC on-site visit, the two libraries agreed upon standards and procedures for creating a joint website for German emblems in which metadata is shared and searching across both collections is possible. Through mirror sites, the user will be able to access the digitized emblem collections of both institutions. The UIUC will also host a portal, limked to the HAB, for emblem studies. Thus, the joint project, which we call “Emblematica On-line,” proposes to create a bi-level emblem portal. This presentation will survey various definitions of portals, show various ways in which these definitions can be applied to an emblem portal, and suggest how an emblem portal might be structured in terms of content.