From Digital Humanities to the Emblem Book as album amicorum
- Date: 25 April 2023, 16:15–18:00
- Location: SCAS, Thunbergssalen, Linneanum, Thunbergsvägen 2, Uppsala
- Type: Seminar
- Lecturer: Mara R. Wade, Fellow, SCAS. Professor of German, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- Web page
- Organiser: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS)
- Contact person: Ellen Werner
Mara R. Wade, SCAS & University of Illinois, gives a seminar on "From Digital Humanities to the Emblem Book as album amicorum". The talk will be followed by a Q&A session.
Digital and traditional research are not mutually exclusive but reciprocal forms of conducting
research that mutually enrich each other. More than two decades of research for the web
resource Emblematica Online revealed that the decentralized “open source” model, a hallmark of our technology today, can inform research about social practices of emblematics. By studying how creators of emblems manipulated this genre’s “open source code” of motto, image, and epigram to link diverse communities, I am able to reframe critical questions about the semantic interplay of texts and images across early modern European society. Informed by concepts of networking, linked open data, open source code, and the semantic web of knowledge, my digital research inspired a new framework for the traditional scholarly monograph. A Social History of the Renaissance Emblem analyzes how a broad set of cultural practices emerged in the 16th century through which emblems became critical to the fabric of social communication. The presentation highlights four of these practices, and then examines the emblem book as an album amicorum as a case study to illustrate the new approach to emblem studies.