Modelling Fashion History by Entities: Artworks, Garments and Events

Using entities to (re)organize and present multimodal data
In this meetup information scientist/art historian Linda Freyberg and web/information designer Giacomo Nanni from the Urban Complexity Lab will present the data workflow in the research project Restaging Fashion.

In the three year digitization and research project Restaging Fashion - Digital contextualization of vestimentary sources situated at the UCLAB in Potsdam new perspectives on historical dress will be elaborated. The project is dedicated to the cultural history of clothing, its appearance and (symbolic) character. At its core is the art collection of Franz and Frieda von Lipperheide in Berlin. This extensive collection of paintings, miniatures, prints and drawings is combined with textual sources and 3D images of a selection of historical garments from the textile collection of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. Based on semantically contextualized multimodal sources (texts, images and historical garments) visualizations serve as an epistemic tool.

Starting with a local database, which already contains about 600 objects linked to vocabularies like ICONCLASS, AAT and GND the data has been further enriched: in the Knowledge Organization System Omeka S the digitized objects are brought together with the use of CIDOC CRM to shape it into Linked Data.

Bridging information visualization and art history, the research project seeks to preserve the expressiveness of the objects and provide for interoperable data to enable scientific discourse. Visual approaches to both, the collection and the modeling, will be presented to enhance research findings and to facilitate data modeling.

Despite the widespread appeal of Linked Data, only a few institutions until today have accomplished to make their collection available as Linked data. A methodological approach is presented, which can be exemplary for multimodal cultural heritage collections.

Agenda

• 16:25 CEST - 16:30 CEST : gathering and welcome
• 16:30 CEST - 17:00 CEST : presentations by Linda Freyberg and Giacomo Nanni from the Urban Complexity Lab about the research project Restaging Fashion.
• 17:00 CEST - 17:30 CEST : Q&A, sharing experiences, discussing challenges

Urban Complexity Lab
The Urban Complexity Lab at the Fachhochschule Potsdam investigates how to make sense of comprehensive datasets and complex issues by developing creative and critical approaches to visualization. In doing so it brings together researchers from the fields of interface design, information retrieval and digital humanities. It cooperates with academic and cultural institutions as well as public and private organizations and strives to have an impact in both academia and the world of practice, especially in the contexts of digital humanities, science communication, and smart cities. The lab itself is a collaboration between the Department of Design and the Urban Futures Institute. The lab is jointly directed by Marian Dörk, research professor for information visualization, and Boris Müller, professor for interaction design.