EMBLEM DIGITIZATION · Study and Digitisation of Italian Emblem Books in the Stirling Maxwell Collection of the Glasgow University Library

Final Activity Report Summary - EMBLEM DIGITIZATION (Study and Digitisation of Italian Emblem Books in the Stirling Maxwell Collection of the Glasgow University Library)

This project focused on the study and digitisation of a selection of 16th century Italian emblem books which are now located in the Stirling Maxwell Collection of Glasgow University Library. Emblems, characterised by the combination of text and image, enjoyed an enormous popularity, and, also thanks to their figurative elements and the many translations or multilingual editions, had wide circulation across Renaissance Europe in academic, court, religious and bourgeois circles, encouraging a fertile dialectic between specific national traditions and common cultural elements. This huge textual and visual corpus had to be considered not only as a sociological and historical document of European culture, but also as an extraordinary, though not yet adequately valued, artistic heritage requiring study, preservation and greater accessibility. Its nature, material conditions and location, arose considerable challenges to be confronted and overcome by means of information technology. For these reasons the literature of images received increasing attention during recent decades and several digitisation projects were undertaken in and outside Europe. Within this context, many Italian emblem books represented a further challenge because of their specific structure, combining images and mottoes with long prose texts, hard to reduce to the discrete units of conventional hypertexts. The most important achievement of this project, along with the study of these precious books, was the development of structures and standards which could serve as a prototype for similar image-text related projects in the humanities, providing the structural and terminological framework for future digital publications in other genres beside the emblem. The work of encoding and indexing emblems was developed in a unified way, integrating the largely unexplored field of Italian emblematics into the general frame of other digitisation projects through the customisation of existing encoding standards that were adopted by other institutions and centres. The fellow was trained to manage the entire digitisation process, which was carried out adopting the best practice and standards currently available to encode emblem books, such as TEI code for texts, Iconclass for images, and specific descriptive metadata. His work resulted in electronic publication on the Web. This project promoted transfer of technology and knowledge towards a less-favoured region of the European Union and enlarged the international network of emblem scholarship and digitisation, thus enabling new long-term collaborations across Europe and developing high skilled operators, instruments and methods which would enhance European scientific excellence.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union