EMIT-X | CLARIN-NL

EMIT-X: Early-Modern Image and Text eXchange

Summary

Data and metadata from the Emblem Project Utrecht (EPU) on an experimental OAI data provider, facilitating sharing and re-use. The EPU-project created a collection of 27 books of love emblems. The Emblem Project Utrecht is a partner in the 'Open Emblem' Initiative which coordinates the emblem metadata integration efforts being done in individual emblem digitisation projects.

Background

In the Netherlands, the Emblem Project Utrecht (EPU, supported by NWO/KNAW) created a collection of 27 books of love emblems, a Dutch invention that became very popular all over Europe during the Early-Modern period. Because of its wide geographical and linguistic dispersion, however, study of the emblem requires access not just to the books of a single national tradition (e.g. the Dutch), but also to the emblem books published in other European countries. As early as 2001 the first symposia were held about the possibilities of creating a single European portal for emblem studies. The Utrecht project has been actively participating in international efforts promoting digital emblem interoperability. For the international Society for Emblem Studies (SES, http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/SES/) the subject of digital collections and collection exchange has been a recurrent topic. Among the joint research questions driving these efforts were the need to study emblems comparatively (over national cultures), to trace the transmission of textual and pictorial motifs, and to study the adaptation of foreign emblem books in local contexts. The Open Emblem Group established by the Society coordinates the efforts.

In EMIT-X two harvestable collections of data were created: the project’s metadata, which describe the emblem’s data structure, harvested for the CMDI, and the projects emblem data (texts of the emblems and associated indexing), harvested by emblem researchers at the OpenEmblem portal and elsewhere. Emblem researchers in the Netherlands and elsewhere are able to search across collections and boundaries. Because EMIT-X also makes available the relevant metadata descriptions in the CLARIN infrastructure, EMIT-X also paved the way for European partner-projects to make their data available in the CLARIN infrastructure. The participation in EMIT-X (at-a-distance) of the international advisory partners guaranteed that the choices made fit within the proposed international collaboration.

Contacts