Cohesion and Coherence in the Datafication of Early Modern Emblems

Abstract:

<aside> 💡 Interdisciplinary research on early modern emblems has allowed a variety of perspectives on emblematics ranging from literary and rhetorical observations to historical and art historical ones, drawing connections to studies of iconology, visual culture, and image-text relations among others. The creation and reception of emblems are complex tasks as they commonly involve a riddle-like multimodal encoding/decoding process with influences from (or references to) historical contexts not necessarily of the creation time. This makes themes of cohesion and coherence a complex and important task in the understanding of emblems. Three main interconnected questions are addressed from a viewpoint of digital and computational humanities:

1. How do research disciplines of emblematics advance and how can they be addressed from a distant viewing/reading or macroperspective?
2. How does the digitization of emblem collections support research in the field and how does it contribute to the understanding of emblems and emblem collections?
3. How can we computationally bridge the gap in the understanding of emblems in relation to cohesion in the multimodal construction of emblems and world knowledge in the creation of coherence?

Questions of coherence and cohesion can be addressed at multiple levels of emblems. On the one hand there are studies on the contributors, authors, designers, and publishers as well as symbolic influences on early modern emblems, while on the other there are more material- and medium-oriented studies on the representation and composition of individual emblems as well as emblem books as collections of emblems.

This presentation follows on how standardization in the digitization process facilitates research on early modern emblems and how it can bring research from different disciplines on early modern emblems and additionally scholars without profound knowledge in the field closer together. As discoverability, accessibility, and the revelation of interconnections between emblems (e.g. Cole, Timothy W., et al , 2017) among others have been purposefully addressed in the Emblematica Online project with the Linked Open Data scheme, factors such as coherence and cohesion are advancing in the datafication process with the metadata and comments – paving way for further rich automatized statistical research on emblems and their multimodal construction.

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