Text / Image interfaces in ancient cultures

Theoretical, methodological, and practical approaches to the combined analysis of textual and visual evidence

University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’, Palazzo Corigliano, Antisala degli Specchi (4th floor), April 13, 2023

Dottorato di ricerca in Asia, Africa e Mediterraneo

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Concept

The Digital Humanities workshop aims to address the topic of modeling text-image relationships in documentary corpora of the ancient world. Many cultures of the ancient world produced a massive amount of both textual and material/visual sources, which are traditionally studied the former with methods peculiar to philological disciplines, the latter with those peculiar to archaeological and art-historical disciplines. Although there are obvious points of contact between the two types of sources, there are serious difficulties in relating them. These arise not only from terminological and disciplinary barriers, but also from the different nature of the sources themselves with their specific and partly divergent modes of communication (cf. the discussion of the concept of "multimodality"). Apart from the conceptual aspects, this state of affairs presents very concrete practical problems at the level of computer management of the data involved whenever an attempt is made to relate textual and nontextual corpora relating to a given "culture" or historical period. The problem is all the more acute in the case of ancient sources, both because of issues related to their coding and because of their typically fragmentary nature, resulting in the need to ensure as much flexibility as possible in their recording and querying. These difficulties have been variously addressed either with the development of so-called formal ontologies (cf. among others Bruseker et al. 2017, Cultural Heritage Data Management: The Role of Formal Ontology and CIDOC CRM) or with authority control systems and specific metadata management applications.

The workshop aims to address the problem of modeling relationships between texts and images both upstream, in its theoretical aspects, and downstream, in its possible practical solutions. To this end, it brings together a group of researchers active in Italy and abroad in the fields of visual studies, multimodality, and computer modeling of textual and archaeological sources (with particular reference to their interaction), with the purpose of contributing to the strengthening of the university's research and educational offerings in the field of Digital Humanities and promoting collaboration between the Department of African, Asian and Mediterranean Studies and other institutions in research on the topic at hand, and actively involve students through the inclusion of the workshop in the AAM doctoral activities and the organization of a 'hands-on' session of experimentation with specific methods and applications discussed in the workshop.

Programme

1. Intro & papers (30 min each) – April 13, 9:30–13:00 (with break); 14:30–15:30

• 9:30 Michele Cammarosano (University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’): Introduction

• 9:45 Andrea D’Andrea (University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’): Digital Approaches for Archaeological Research

• 10:15 Elisa Roßberger (FU Berlin): Multimodal analysis of ancient Western Asian cylinder seals: Ideal vs. reality

  • break

• 11:15 Julian Bogdani (Sapienza Università di Roma): Digital infrastructures that bridge the gaps: the case study of PAThs: The Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature

• 11:45 Gerfrid G. W. Müller (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz): Challenges and solutions in the digital management of large text corpora with fluid edition: the case of the Hittite festival texts and the HFR project

• 12:15 Christoph Forster (datalino.de, Berlin): Mapping in Images. Techniques and Concepts

• 14:30 Alessandra Gilibert (University of Venice Ca’ Foscari): Image-Text Interactions in Syro-Anatolian Art: State of the Art and new Perspectives

• 15:00 Renzo Orsini (University of Venice Ca’ Foscari): From Thesauri to Description Bases: A model to represent and query homogeneously text and images

2. Round table & posters – April 13, 15:30–16:30

3. Hands-on session – April 13, 17–18 (on-site participants only)

Speakers

• Julian Bogdani (La Sapienza University of Rome, https://lad.saras.uniroma1.it/)

• Andrea D'Andrea (University of Naples 'L'Orientale', https://docenti.unior.it/index2.php?content_id=18117&content_id_start=1)

• Christoph Forster (co-founder of the company "datalino", https://datalino.de/)

• Alessandra Gilibert (Ca' Foscari University of Venice, https://www.unive.it/data/persone/12306189)

• Gerfrid G. W. Müller (Mainz Academy of Sciences and Letters, https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/altorientalistik/team/mueller/ )

• Renzo Orsini (Ca' Foscari University of Venice, https://www.dsi.unive.it/~orsini/wordpress/?page_id=164)

• Elisa Roßberger (Freie Universität Berlin, https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/vaa/vaa/mitarbeiter/Professorinnen_und_Professoren/Rossberger.html)