Project History

From 2002-2005 University of Illinois and the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbttel, Germany (HAB) received joint funding of 45,000 Euros as a Transcoop grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This grant provided the opportunity to conduct the preliminary work leading to the joint proposal for the present project. In the framework of the Transcoop project, the University of Illinois was able to digitize and create searchable metadata for 19 emblem books. The HAB produced digital facsimiles of 46 emblem books. We held three independent workshops (one with an associated publication) and hosted at Illinois the first ever state-of-the art conference on emblem digitization in 2005. (Both teams were able to leverage this funding to create further support at their respective institutions; the University of Illinois generously funded the Seventh Triennial Conference of the International Society for Emblem Studies, 2005.)

This funding allowed for the establishment of a corpus of digitized books, the development of a data structure specific to emblems, and the development of 1) a German-English thesaurus, 2) the concept of a unified search structure for separately held collections, and 3) a common metadata structure. It also led to the creation of an XML structure for emblem encoding and of a first portal for emblematica. These activities demanded intensive research into the respective collections, and resulted in the retroactive cataloguing of all emblem books at the University of Illinois that will be completed before the end of 2008.

Most importantly, the Transcoop grant funded two site visits and three workshops on emblem digitization. The HAB research team came to Illinois for two weeks, while the US research team visited the HAB for three days before an international workshop on emblem digitization. The results of this workshop (2003) were published as Digital Collections and the Management of Knowledge: Renaissance Emblem Literature as a Case Study for the Digitization of Rare Texts and Images, February 2004, by DigiCULT. This grant also allowed for the HAB participants to attend the Seventh Triennial Conference of the Society of Emblem Studies at the University of Illinois in 2005. Embedded in this conference was the first ever state-of-the-art conference on emblem digitization, "Portals, Tools, and Data: Conducting Digital Research with Renaissance Texts and Images." The first volume of essays resulting from the main conference appeared as Emblematica 15 (2007) and received a favorable review in the scholarly journals issue of the Times Literary Supplement. The second volume of essays from this conference is at press and appeared in fall 2008 as Emblematica 16.

The third workshop funded by the Transcoop grant at the HAB, "Practical Issues of International Emblem Digitization," was held in March 2007. This workshop strengthened the international ties among recently completed projects at the universities of Glasgow and Utrecht and provided the opportunity to include new projects in the OpenEmblem group (for example, Universit Francois-Rabelais de Tours, CNRS). Related project groups in Spain and Italy also expressed their interest in the OpenEmblem research group. Of great significance to all participants, especially for the workshop organizers from the HAB and Illinois, was to learn concretely from the experiences of the Glasgow and Utrecht projects, as well as to consult with Hans Brandhorst of arkyves (formerly Mnemosyne). The Transcoop grant, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, also allowed the HAB to purchase a digital camera and a laptop for the project, and funded a part-time student researcher at the HAB. Members of the OpenEmblem research group also consulted at the Eighth International Conference for Emblem Studies, Winchester, England, July 2008, where there was a panel on emblem digitization. This triennial conference is sponsored by the Society for Emblem Studies.

The HAB in its Baroque-Document Type Definition project (Barock DTD, 2000-2002) digitized 38 emblem books (8993 pages), of which 10 imprints containing 598 emblems were indexed in-depth. (During the same period Illinois digitized 19 emblem books with app. 2,384 emblems and 3,725 pages.) The motto, pictura, and subscriptio for each emblem were indexed and made accessible in a provisional database. In this systematic project the HAB developed basic features of describing and indexing emblem books by using current electronic media. While the basic unit is the emblem book, emblems were encoded at the level of the individual emblem unit. The encoding uses TEI for text and metadata, as TEI best serves the purpose of encoding full texts. It also provides for the linking of images for convenient access of the digitized facsimile edition of an emblem book. For reasons of efficiency a selection of the texts from an emblem book was transcribed and keyed in. According to this selection all data and metadata to motto, pictura, and subscriptio were included in the TEI compliant documents, but not, for example, the prose commentary expanding the subscriptio, which can be found in various emblem books (e.g. Jakob Bornitz). The encoding allowed for extracting the emblem data quite easily. For this purpose a special format (XML-schema) was developed, the Emblem Schema, into which the TEI structures can be exported. Thus book and emblem information can be seamlessly integrated by using different namespaces (TEI and emblem schema). The emblem schema is flexible and can also capture emblem data stemming from non-book sources, such as art objects, architecture, etc. The emblem schema was used to develop a prototype of a union catalogue of emblem mottos. Metadata of mottos from projects at the universities Glasgow, Illinois, Munich, and Utrecht, and at the HAB were converted to the schema by XSLT scripts and included in a database.

Another 60 emblem books were added to this first collection in the course of the project funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The digitized imprints were catalogued at book-level; owing to limited funds there was no emblem-level indexing of the texts, mottos, and picturae in the framework of this project. Today there are 96 emblem books online and accessible via the HAB website, but only ten of them have metadata appropriate for scholarly purposes. All digitized imprints are linked to the library central catalogue and may be accessed through web search engines such as Google, the emblem database, or other portals. The project thereby sets up an infrastructure that allows for multiple points of user access. All project components rely on tools and standards that warrant longevity and persistence.