Emblematica Online is a joint digitization project between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. The project at the University of Illinois is funded by the Office of Digital Humanities, NEH. More information is available from the project homepage
Emblematica Online will present emblem books in an innovative digital environment and to develop a portal for a key genre of Renaissance texts and images. Emblematica Online will fulfill its goals through its three constituent activities: 1) Emblem Digitization: the complete digitization of two premiere emblem collections of world-wide prominence; 2) The German Emblem Databases: the creation of extensive metadata with broad functionality for the German emblems of both institutions in mirror websites; and 3) The OpenEmblem Portal: the development of the portal as an open access research site incorporating book-level metadata from emblem digitization projects worldwide and emblem-level metadata from Illinois and the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB). The OpenEmblem Portal hosted at Illinois will have a mirror portal at the HAB. The OpenEmblem Portal offers the ability to search and browse across significant levels of granularity, creating functional access to the entire collections of emblem books at Illinois and HAB, to book-level metadata for a number of projects worldwide, and to a large corpus of emblem-level metadata for German emblems from the collections of Illinois and the HAB. Because major search engines such as Google can find the data from these projects, the mass digitization undertaken for Emblematica Online will serve scholarly communities in Germany, the US, and beyond, for research and in higher education.
The projects had a start date of November 1, 2009. The research team at the University of Illinois has completed scanning of all emblem books at the University of Illinois that could be scanned. These books are now available through the Internet Archive. In the coming year the project will focus on the development of the German Emblem Database and of the OpenEmblem Portal. By digitizing 337 rare, and in some cases unique, emblem books containing roughly 32,000 individual emblems, we have met our first year benchmark. The Herzog August Bibliothek is digitizing approximately the same number of books, thus the joint project will present roughly 800 emblem books with approximately 70,000 individual emblems on the web. The projects are creating emblem-level metadata of text and images (using Iconclass) for all German-language emblem books in a searchable database. Book-level metadata for the digitized emblem books and all emblem-level metadata for the German books will be made available and freely accessible at the mirror portal, the OpenEmblem Portal that is currently in development. We also expect to include book-level metadata from other emblem projects, at least in a preliminary way in the OpenEmblem Portal by the time we complete this phase of the project in December 2011.
We have concentrated on digitization and metadata creation during the first year, and will focus on Portal development in the coming year. Thus, the small handful of emblem books on the German Emblem website are presented in our university’s database via ContentDM and do not yet reflect the Iconclass encoding which is the focus of the coming year. The current Portal contains limited meta-data from the University of Illinois, the Herzog Auugst Bibliothek, and the Emblem Project Utrecht.
The term "semantic web" is so often used that it has almost become a meaningless buzzword. That is very unfortunate since a semantic web is exactly what the portal is spinning over a unique corpus of early modern imagery and texts. By gathering well over 10,000 specimens of one of the most popular and widespread art forms of the Renaissance and by offering access to its subject matter in unprecedented depth and detail, completely new forms of research become feasible. Creating a database of the mottos and indexing the meaning of the imagery and the visual means—situations, persons, objects—that were used to express it, make possible highly associative searching and browsing that by its very nature offers the opportunity of what may be called "knowledge discovery." This concept, often used to describe new forms of research that become possible when biomedical or chemical data are collected in huge databases such as PubMed, will also be applicable to Emblematica Online. The essential analogy is that a large quantity of material is combined with sophisticated information about its content. Reliable quantitative information will become available about the occurrence of themes and motives in artistic and literary sources, a hitherto unknown phenomenon. Scholars using this material will no longer have to describe many thousands of images to grasp their content; they can devote their energy to new research questions.
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