DIGITAL HUMANITIES, ICONOGRAPHY AND VISUAL CULTURE (original) (raw)
2022, Critical Digital Humanities International Conference (#CDHIcon22) at the University of Toronto.
The presentation addressed the Baptisteria Sacra Index (BSI), an ongoing digital humanities research project that documents baptismal fonts from the early Christian period to the seventeenth century. The BSI database was designed to record iconographical information and provide compositional, narrative and semantic structures of the motifs and images identified on these liturgical vessels. The historical development of iconography and iconology are the foundations upon which art historians analyze visual data. However, the approaches to iconography in the digital humanities today vary, with little concern about sustaining digital research. This paper presents information about the tools utilized in the image analysis and their pros and cons; it also covers the metadata collected, which are required to reconstruct the pictorial programs ornamenting these liturgical vessels for long-term sustainability of the project. It focuses on the extraction of social and religious biases and examples of how such imagery is documented in iconographical schema. Learn more by exploring the abstracts for this year’s conference. Paper presented at the Critical Digital Humanities International, this year’s conference foregrounds critical DH research, praxis, and community partnerships. Critical DH is an intersectional field that emphasizes questions of power, social justice, and critical theory in making, analyzing, and using digital technologies. This is a version of digital humanities that places anti-racist, de/anti/postcolonial, feminist, and queer/trans/non-binary work at its core, and which understands our current shift in digital technology as an opportunity for social and political transformation. Critical DH foregrounds creative praxis, co-creation, public engagement, and community-based research.