[Use Cases] Examples from Digital Emblematica

Here are three scholarly examples from the Emblem Online Virtual
Collection.

Some quick context first. Emblematica are an early modern literary genre
that combine text with images. The majority were published in the
intervening years between 1530 and 1760. Each emblem consists of a motto
(text) at the top, a pictura (image) in the middle, and a subscriptio (more
text) at the bottom.

A repository collaboratively built by the Herzog August Bibliothek
Wolfenbüttel and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the
Emblematica Online Virtual Collection collects over 700 digitized emblem
books containing more than 18,000 emblems. Our three most common use cases
are:

1) Simple comparisons using a compound target:
Amy writes a brief summary comparing the similarity of the motifs that
appear in two different pictura.

2) Discover resources through context (search):
Bill is interested what other scholars have said about emblems in a
specific emblem book -- La Doctrine des Moeurs. He searches for it and the
system provides a list of all the annotations that emblems in the book play
some role in (either as part of a body or as part of a target).

3) Supporting discourse:
Caiyan remarks on the motifs in a pair of pictura and Devin responds with
an alternate explanation for how the two images are related to one another.
In this case it's unclear if the target of annotation 2 should be
annotation 1 or the combination of annotation 1 and the two pictura. I'd
argue that the latter is probably more appropriate but it could easily go
the other way (it's much less verbose the other way), so we have a good
opportunity here for building some consensus on best practices for
annotations that comprise discourse.


Regards,

Jacob


______________________________________
Jacob Jett
Research Assistant
Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship
The Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, MC-493, Champaign, IL 61820-6211 USA
(217) 244-2164
jjett2@illinois.edu