Emblems Digitisation Project
Follow-up meeting
Palma de Mallorca, 6 October 2001
Salient Points From Round Table Discussion
on Emblem Digitalization at Palma de Mallorca
Moderated by David Graham
Prior to the beginning of the round table, Alison Adams and
Stephen Rawles distributed a "Provisional List of Emblem Books
Suggested for Digitisation" based on input received from those scholars
who met at the University of Glasgow in the summer of 2001 for an Emblems
Digitisation Workshop. Nuccio Ordine inaugurated the session
with a review of the work begun at the Glasgow workshop in the summer
of 2001. The agreement, as he saw it, was the production of one or more
CD ROMs, financed by Nino Aragno, with the 100 most important
European emblem books.
Alison Adams then explained that a continuation of the Glasgow
discussions was necessary because some groups had not been represented
at the June meeting. She then gave a summary of the decisions that had
already been made: we had agreed to collaborate on a CD project with
Nino Aragno that would reproduce high quality archival images
of a mutually agreed upon list of about one hundred emblem books utilizing
software that was platform independent. It was further agreed in Glasgow
that we needed to include a rigorous and uniform tagging scheme. Alison
also indicated that Glasgow was involved with contract negotiations
that would allow us to scan the emblem books in the library's collection.
David Graham reminded the group that we had discussed the use
of Iconclass as our classifying tool in June. He summarized some advantages
and disadvantages of this tool. Although Iconclass is free, its inclusion
on a CD ROM may not be free. There could be a charge, though perhaps
only a nominal one. The application of Iconclass to our corpus would
be extremely time-consuming and potentially costly. We want texts and
pictures tagged in a uniform, consistent way so that everything is lemmatized.
Although Iconclass can accomplish this, we still have a lot to talk
about.
Sagrario López Poza objected that Iconclass may prove
too cumbersome to use by scholars in Philology. Peter M. Daly
added that Iconclass privileges pictures, and is not geared to the inclusion
of text. Nieves Rodríguez Brisaboa informed us that Iconclass
was developed for manual use, and not for computers. It was her opinion
that we now have more powerful and user-friendly tools at our disposal.
Nieves viewed cross-language queries and translation from one language
to another as potential problems with Iconclass, although Stephen
Rawles pointed out that Iconclass can handle these tasks. Nieves
agreed, but reminded us that they had to be done manually. Tamas
Sajo indicated that Iconclass was developed in the 1950's for general
iconographical description. It was designed to handle many artifacts
from ancient times to the end of the 19th century. A limitation of iconclass
is that it does not describe cultural or period specific meanings of
a given motif. David Graham clarified that the discussion had
turned to the issue of image description versus image analysis. He added
that although the Glasgow discussions seemed to favor the use of Iconclass,
we had not committed ourselves to it. He also agreed that rigor and
consistency of tagging were fundamental criteria. Peter M. Daly
termed the issue at hand one of identification versus interpretation.
John T. Cull suggested that, in view of time constraints, any
decision on the appropriate tool for emblem digitisation should be postponed
until the September 2002 International Congress in La Coruña,
and that further discussion of the issues could be continued until then
through the electronic mailing list created by David Graham after
the Glasgow meeting.
The meeting continued with some other issues that were not fully discussed.
Nuccio Ordine expressed concern over which groups were to be
involved in the project and the decision-making. Stephen Rawles
asserted that Alciato's emblem book should be the starting point, since
many of the texts and translations are already keyed in. This would
allow for a CD ROM with both text and images. Peter M. Daly expressed
concern over the fact that so many scholars are working independently
on electronic editions that duplication is inevitable. It was pointed
out to him that a good part of the discussion at Glasgow had been devoted
to this concern. Nuccio Ordine summarized his view that the project
should consist of two phases. In the initial phase, CDs would be produced
with scanned images, and minimal indexing. A second phase might include
CDs with much more elaborate indexing. It was generally agreed that
the offer of having a lot of emblem books fully digitised was appealing.
David Graham reminded all the participants that we need
not wait in silence until the conference in La Coruña: the electronic
discussion list he created is an appropriate forum for further dialogue.
Discussion then turned briefly to the choice of books to be included
in the project. The Rev. G. Richard Dimler wondered why Solórzano
Pereira was omitted from the provisional list if we included Mendo.
Alison Adams said that one consideration in choosing texts might
be whether they had already been digitised by other people. However,
she recognized that the provisional list distributed included works
that had already been done. Peter M. Daly cautioned that
agreement on the 100 best emblem books would be incredibly difficult,
especially in view of the fact that his database included more than
6,000 titles. Antonio Bernat Vistarini voiced the opinion
that we needed to at least agree on some minimal standards for the second
phase of the project, and he wondered if it was not possible on the
spot to agree on some basic principles of description. Nieves Rodríguez
Brisaboa thought that it might be most useful to gather together
all the databases already developed and to use them to build a superimposed
search engine that might unify them all. Peter M. Daly warned
that the commercialization of federally funded research projects might
pose a great obstacle. David Graham summarized the consensus
that the use of the books in the Glasgow collection and starting from
scratch would result in conformity, high quality of the images scanned,
and the guaranteed rights to reproduce them.
John Cull, Alison Adams, David Graham
Addendum: Phase One
The University of Glasgow wishes and indeed needs to start working
on Phase 1, that is the production of a first CD or CDs, consisting
largely of scanned images with a very minimum of indexing. To help decisions
to be made on what texts to include, we would like to concentrate first
of all on Alciato editions. We are therefore recirculating the Alciato
list, with additions made in Palma, and would ask to receive comments
and particularly additions to this list (via the electronic mailing
list or by E-mail to A.Adams@french.arts.gla.ac.uk), by 15 January 2002.
If anyone has any indexing material (e.g. keywords for images of
particular additions) which they would be willing for us to use, please
could you also let us know.
Alison Adams
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