Stitch project
The stitch work project is a project “Reception of Antiquity in the Semantic Network”, funded by the German Research Foundation since September 2009 (stitch work project). As part of this project, old printed works on ancient sites, buildings and sculptures as well as other archaeological finds are digitized and made accessible worldwide within the Arachne image database of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and the research archive for ancient plastic at the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne .
requirements
The basis is the early prints ( engravings ) on classical , Near Eastern and Egyptian archeology from the period between 1500 and 1830 from the library of the DAI Rome, which were published in the course of dealing with the excavations and finds of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean region .
aims
A total of around 800 engravings with approx. 210,000 pages are taken into account, which are digitized so that they are available as searchable full text. Essential information in this text is marked in a computer-readable manner (OCR) , and the objects treated in the engravings are contextualized . This primarily concerns the structural metadata of the print, such as tables of contents, the occurrence of images or captions, but also library data of the book. These are structured in cooperation with the DAI's ZENON database with the help of a TEI editor developed for this purpose by the Research Archive for Ancient Sculpture . I.e. the technical book structure in cover, title, table of contents, table, etc. is indexed with the help of the user interface of the TEI editor, so that links are created in a standardized way.
Among the semantic metadata , the objects depicted or described in the prints, as well as places and people, are primarily relevant. This information is identified and linked with the associated information in the Arachne image and object database; ie with "real" objects or the relevant collection, topography and reception data sets . If this information is not yet available in Arachne, the corresponding data records are created. Using the Stosch gem collection , the contextualization of the semantic metadata is deepened in an exemplary manner .
The digitized titles can also be found using the metasearch of the “PropylaeumSEARCH2” virtual specialist library.
The findings on former storage locations and the history of the collection or archaeological publication history to be expected from the overall project up to the end of the 19th century. will allow future research numerous insights into the change in the understanding of antiquity from the Baroque , Enlightenment and Classicism . The project thus provides insights into the history of archeology , the reception of antiquities in different epochs, the history of various collections and the development of archaeological publications. Ultimately, the project contributes to interdisciplinary and cultural-historical research.
Institutions involved
- Headquarters Berlin of the German Archaeological Institute ; ZENON database
- German Archaeological Institute Rome
- Research archive for ancient sculpture Cologne
- Heidelberg University Library
- Winckelmann Society , Stendal