=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3110/paper14
|storemode=property
|title=Graph-Based Paths through a Narrative Corpus of Images: A Digital Edition of Giovanni
Domenico Tiepolo’s Divertimento per li regazzi Based on the CIDOC
CRM
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3110/paper14.pdf
|volume=Vol-3110
|authors=Rostislav Tumanov,Gabriel Viehhauser,Alina Feldmann,Barbara Koller
}}
==Graph-Based Paths through a Narrative Corpus of Images: A Digital Edition of Giovanni
Domenico Tiepolo’s Divertimento per li regazzi Based on the CIDOC
CRM==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3110/paper14.pdf
Graph-Based Paths through a Narrative
Corpus of Images: A Digital Edition of
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s
Divertimento per li regazzi Based on the
CIDOC CRM
Rostislav Tumanov1 Gabriel Viehhauser1 Alina Feldmann1
Barbara Koller1
1 University of Stuttgart
Stuttgart, Germany
Abstract
In the following paper, we discuss a digital edition of Giovanni Domen-
ico Tiepolo’s Divertimento per li regazzi (c. 1797–1804) currently be-
ing prepared at the University of Stuttgart. The Divertimento is a series
of pen and ink wash drawings that can be understood as a narrative se-
quence, since the images center around the life story of Pulcinella, a
character that first gained notoriety through the Commedia dell’arte
and the puppet theater. However, a number of repetitions and con-
tradictions make it impossible to arrange all of the drawings that make
up the Divertimento into a coherent, chronological narrative. A mul-
titude of corresponding motifs establish internal relations between the
drawings as well as external links to other works of art and cultural prac-
tices, thereby complicating matters even further. We argue that the Di-
vertimento’s open structure can best be represented in a digital edition
based on a graph data model which follows the event-based structure
Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
In: Tara Andrews, Franziska Diehr, Thomas Efer, Andreas Kuczera and Joris van Zun-
dert (eds.): Graph Technologies in the Humanities - Proceedings 2020, published at
http://ceur-ws.org.
294
of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM). After
presenting the principles of our data model, we will outline the possib-
ilities for a visualization of this model in a web-based front end.
1 Introduction
As many recent projects have shown, graph data models are becoming more
and more ubiquitous in the digital humanities. Graphs have come to play
a major role in the modeling of predominantly non-textual data, both in
the domain of cultural heritage and knowledge representation. Here, the
CIDOC CRM ontology (Le Boeuf et al., 2009) provides a solid and widely
discussed meta-model that can be applied to a wide variety of different ob-
jects and serves as a standard that is – at least to an extent – able to establish in-
teroperability between data models from diverse domains. Graphs have also
gained more and more attention in the field of text representation, which lies
at the core of digital editions. The notion of text as a graph (Haentjens Dek-
ker and Birnbaum, 2017; Andrews and Macé, 2013; Efer, 2016; Kuczera,
2016) offers an alternative to the hitherto widely used XML formats and
their well-known drawbacks: following the principles of the Ordered Hier-
archy of Content Objects model (OHCO) (DeRose et al., 1990; Renear
et al., 1996), XML forces texts into a hierarchical framework that is not par-
ticularly apt to represent multiple overlapping layers of text structures and
their annotations (Schmidt, 2010).
In this paper, we wish to introduce a project that lies at the intersection
of these two fields of application – a digital edition of Giovanni Domenico
Tiepolo’s Divertimento per li regazzi that is being prepared at the University
of Stuttgart in a joint collaboration between the Department of Digital Hu-
manities at the Institute of Literary Studies and the Institute of Art History.
Since Tiepolo’s series of drawings is, to an extent, structured like a narrat-
ive (and can consequently be understood as a text in the wider sense of the
term), we draw on the example of digital editions in the field of digital liter-
ary studies, but at the same time use data models from the cultural heritage
domain.
In the following section, we will provide a brief introduction to the Di-
vertimento by discussing some of its specific characteristics and the context
in which it was created. Section 3 explores the requirements that result from
this background for an appropriate display of the artifact. In section 4 we dis-
cuss the principles of our data model, while section 5 presents ideas for the
visualization of the series in a web-based front end. Section 6 summarizes
295
our results in a conclusion.
2 Divertimento per li regazzi
The series Divertimento per li regazzi was created by the Venetian artist Gio-
vanni Domenico Tiepolo during the final years of his life, between 1797 and
1804. It consists of 104 drawings, each of which feature Pulcinella, a popu-
lar character from the Commedia dell’arte and the puppet theater. Tiepolo
drew on a wide range of sources, including his own works as well as those of
other artists, particularly his father Giambattista – one of the most famous
Italian painters of the eighteenth century. After the drawings appeared in
public in the year 1920, they were sold separately and are now spread across
numerous collections, which renders the task of bringing together all of the
drawings in one place virtually impossible.
Since all of the drawings depict Pulcinella (or to be more precise: almost
always several Pulcinelli) in a similar fashion, albeit at different stages in his
life (e.g. as a child, as a young man, and before his death), the series at first
glance appears to be a kind of biographical portrait. However, due to repe-
titions of very similar events, not to mention some contradictory images, it
is impossible to arrange all of the drawings into a single, coherent narrative
(Vetrocq, 1979, pp. 19-20): for example, Pulcinella is executed in two dif-
ferent ways in two of the drawings, whereas another image shows him being
pardoned for his crimes. Moreover, the fact that most of the drawings show
several Pulcinelli in a single image forces the viewer to decide which one is
the actual protagonist of the scene. Thus, in contradistinction to a ‘regu-
lar’ narrative series, there is no clear order of the pictures and no ‘correct’
or intentional course of the narrative. Instead, the series opens up a broad
range of stories that can be reconstructed and arranged by the viewer (Gealt,
1986, pp. 19-20) (Gottdang, 2015, pp. 81-86), who thereby assumes the
role of narrator and turns into an active participant in the playful retelling
of Pulcinella’s life, as befits the character’s theatrical origin in the Commedia
dell’arte (Tumanov, 2019).
However, the possibility of arranging the material in different ways does
not mean that certain rules cannot or should not be applied while ‘read-
ing’ the Divertimento. On the contrary, finding a way through the plethora
of possibilities requires the application of specific perspectives that are con-
ducive to arranging the material in a manageable and meaningful manner.
From a point of view that emphasizes the narrative logic of the series, not
all of the possible arrangements appear to be equally plausible: biographical
readings, for example, would suggest that drawings showing Pulcinella as a
child should precede images portraying him as an adult, or those addressing
296
his death.
Besides this chronological or syntagmatic order, Pulcinella’s life story is
also supplemented by a paradigmatic dimension that is established by the
repetition of specific motifs. For example, several drawings contain a pot
of gnocchi that is traditionally strongly associated with the Pulcinella char-
acter. The repetition of this motif establishes relations between individual
drawings that complement or even undermine the syntagmatic structure of
the biographic narrative.
Finally, these internal paradigmatic relations are supplemented by external
links to other works of art, motifs, or practices. To give but one example,
the scene that depicts the shooting of Pulcinella clearly refers to one of the
plates of the Grandes Misères de la guerre by Jacques Callot. Contextualiza-
tions like these not only show which artists Tiepolo himself was influenced
by, but also shed new light on the meaning of the drawings. This holds true
on a more abstract level as well, as the richness of the Divertimento’s interre-
lationships makes it highly likely that the series was designed with the inten-
tion of playing with various types of allusions, recurring motifs, and their
continuous modification. Tiepolo’s drawings thus recall practices known
from the Commedia dell’arte, which is based on fixed character types whose
dramatic repertoires can nonetheless be recombined to generate nearly lim-
itless variations of their stereotypical roles.
3 A Digital Edition of the Divertimento
As previous research has shown, this richness of possible relations is hard to
grasp via conventional means. In the printed catalogue of the Divertimento
published by Adelheid Gealt (1986), which still forms the basis of scholarly
engagement with the series, the drawings are presented in a page-by-page se-
quence, and although Gealt (1986, pp. 16-17) hints at the open structure of
the series, this arrangement suggests a specific, predetermined sequence of
images. Ultimately, this static structure is the result of the specific medium
involved: printed books favor sequential and closed arrangements, since they
are often intended to be read in a linear order and are subject to limitations
in terms of their page count.
More recent endeavors, especially in the field of textual scholarship, have
shown that the limitations of print media can be overcome with the help of
digital editions that are able to present material in a more dynamic way: due
to the (potentially) infinite space of the digital medium, a digital edition en-
ables the juxtaposition of multiple perspectives on a given text. And because
electronic texts are versatile as opposed to permanently fixed, these different
perspectives can be linked, dynamically arranged, and contextualized in po-
297
tentially infinite ways (Pierazzo, 2016; Sahle, 2013).
A similar media shift would make it possible to present the Divertimento
in a manner that takes full account of the series’ open structure and its em-
beddedness in a rich network of relationships. We therefore propose apply-
ing methods that were originally developed with the purpose of textual rep-
resentation in the field of digital editions in mind to Tiepolo’s series of draw-
ings.
In our edition of the Divertimento, we seek to lay the groundwork for
the study of the multitude of perspectives that arise from the network of
paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations that can be found in the series. To
this end, we have identified four key requirements for a digital edition of the
series:
• The goal of the edition should not be to reconstruct a single linear se-
quence, but rather to identify and highlight possible links which are
suggested by the series itself, while enabling the viewer to find diverse
ways through the narrative space of the Divertimento.
• To achieve this goal, a data model is needed that provides a logical nar-
rative framework without determining a fixed sequence.
• The data model has to take into account syntagmatic as well as paradig-
matic relations.
• It should be capable of incorporating internal as well as external refer-
ences that reach out into the Semantic Web.
4 Data Model
4.1 Advantages of Graph Data Models and the CIDOC CRM
Given the Divertimento’s open structure and the fundamentally non-textual
nature of its material, we decided not to use an XML structure for our un-
derlying data model as is common in text editions, especially in the form out-
lined by the guidelines of the TEI.1 Rather, we opted for a graph data model,
since it is particularly well suited for representing not only syntagmatic, but
also paradigmatic relations, as well as possible external links without estab-
lishing a fixed hierarchy or prescribing ways how these relations should be
ordered.
Figure 1 illustrates the advantages of such a model for our purposes: print
editions foster the approach that can be seen on the left, where one page after
the other is accessed in a linear sequence. As shown on the right, digital mod-
els, and especially graph models, not only make it possible to follow different
paths through the narrative (e.g. from p2 to p3 or p4), but also to envis-
1
https://tei-c.org/
298
Figure 1: Characteristics of print and digital editions (p = page, ex = external link)
age paradigmatic relations that result from the repetition of motifs: either
between the drawings in the series (e.g. between p2 and p20), or between
the series and external works of art or cultural practices (e.g. between p2 and
ex1).
Given that digital representations show the most potential when they
are interoperable and can be connected to other digital sources, and that
they are much more sustainable if they are built on the basis of a non-
proprietary format, we decided to use the CIDOC Conceptual Reference
Model (Le Boeuf et al., 2009) as the underlying standard for our specific
model. The CIDOC CRM originally stems from the field of cultural herit-
age, but is becoming more and more widely used as a top-level ontology in
the digital humanities in general (Eide and Ore, 2018).
Apart from the benefits of standardization, what makes the CIDOC
CRM so suitable to the requirements of our project is its event-based struc-
ture and its connectivity to Linked Open Data (LOD). Besides physical ob-
jects, temporal entities are crucial basic units in the CRM. This allows for
the connection of cultural artefacts to events that are related to these arte-
facts, and in turn to persons or any other entities that are connected to these
events. Thus, the CRM makes it possible not only to describe objects, but
also to connect them to a wide variety of entities of all kinds, including non-
material occurrences and the actors that are involved in them. In this way,
the CRM can be used to establish a web of knowledge representation that
takes into account highly diverse sources.
299
4.2 Chronological Backbone
Our basic principle for modeling the Divertimento is to adopt the event-
based structure of the CRM by using the events that are a part of Pulcinella’s
‘virtual’ life story as a starting point instead of objects like the individual
drawings. More specifically, we establish a node for the whole life story and
subsume it to the CIDOC CRM E4_Period class.2 Individual sections of
this life story, such as Pulcinella’s birth, his childhood, his adolescence, etc.
are classified as E5_Events. These sections are in turn segmented in instances
of the E7_Activity class for further specification. For example, the section
‘Geburt und Kindheit Pulcinellas und Familienszenen’ (Pulcinella’s birth,
childhood, and domestic life’) consists of E7_Activities like ‘Geburt Pul-
cinellas’ (Pulcinella’s birth), ‘Pulcinella als Säugling’ (Pulcinella as an infant),
‘Kindheitsszenen’ (childhood scenes), and so on.
In order to convey the narrative logic that requires sections like Pul-
cinella’s childhood to chronologically precede sections like that of his ad-
olescence, we establish P120_occurs_before-relations between the respect-
ive E5_Event nodes. The P120 property is particularly suitable for our pur-
poses, since it does not make any assumptions about the time span that lies
between two events, but expresses a temporal sequence only. A special case
in this respect is the first E5_Event in our model, which is represented by a
single drawing, namely the title page or frontispiece:3 although the frontis-
piece clearly serves as an introductory image to the series, it can also be seen
as its endpoint, since it features a stone block that could be interpreted as
Pulcinella’s tomb.4 This once again demonstrates that the series’ narrative is
not simply linear – rather, it simultaneously evokes and defies the rules of a
sequential reading. As a corollary, we also established a P120_occurs_before
relation between the final events of Pulcinella’s life story – ‘Postmortales,’ a
category containing events that are likely to happen after his death, such as
the laying out of his body – and the frontispiece. The narrative thus becomes
an endless circle of events which can play out again and again with almost un-
limited variations.5
2
For this particular project, we have chosen to draw on the OWL-based version of
the CIDOC, the Erlangen CRM (http://erlangen-crm.org/), which we adapted with
the help of the ontology editor Protégé (https://protege.stanford.edu/). An OWL
file of the current version of our model can be found on our Github page: ht-
tps://github.com/Gabvie/Divertimento.
3
The E5_Event is named ‘Frontispiz’ accordingly. One could argue that a frontispiece is
not an event. However, the title merely serves as a placeholder for ‘events taking place before
the story’ or ‘events that precede the temporal order of the story’
4
This view is supported by the motif correspondences to other tombstones or stone
blocks depicted in other drawings of the series.
5
This decision leads to difficulties in the visualization of our edition, which will be dis-
300
Once this chronological backbone is established, we assign the individual
drawings to the E5_Events by using the relation P62_depicts.
Figure 2: Detail from a network visualization of the data model, centered around
two event nodes
An example of this model of the chronological order can be found in Fig-
ure 2, visualized with the help of the RDF database GraphDB.6 Here we
see two E5_Event nodes – ‘Geburt und Kindheit Pulcinellas und Famili-
enszenen’ (‘Pulcinella’s birth, childhood, and domestic life’) and ‘Pulcinel-
las Berufe’ (‘Pulcinella’s professions’) – and their connections. Each node
is colored red. The yellow nodes, meanwhile, represent the individual draw-
ings that are assigned to the E5_Events with the relation P62_depicts. As the
example of ‘Bild 8’ shows (Image 8, titled ‘Der junge Pulcinella beobachtet
Landarbeiter’ – ‘The Young Pulcinella observes the laborers’), drawings can
be linked to two events provided that they can reasonably be sorted into both
of the respective sections.
The two E5_Event nodes are connected by various relations (amongst
them P120_occurs_before) and through E7_Activity nodes (colored light
blue), such as ‘Pulcinella lernt das Laufen’ (‘Pulcinella learns to walk’),
which further subdivide the events. Both E5_Event nodes are also connec-
ted to the overall E4_Period node, ‘Das Leben des Pulcinella’ (‘Pulcinella’s
life story’), colored purple.
Within an event group, the individual images remain freely sortable
without further chronological arrangement, or can be brought into a more
cussed in Section 5.
6
http://graphdb.ontotext.com/
301
closely specified chronology by linking E7_Activities. In this way, it be-
comes possible to model not only very basic temporal divisions, but also spe-
cific chronological sequences, so that variable courses of action can be taken
without the limitations of a rigid linear arrangement.
4.3 Motif Correspondences
In order to link corresponding motifs, we first establish a node for each motif
that we consider to be relevant. This is a hermeneutical task, since it is clearly
impracticable (if not impossible) to identify and list all the motifs that are
to be found in a given image, and to do so in a non-interpretative fashion.7
Thus, the number of motifs that can be established as nodes is in principle
completely open, and is not ultimately determined by the publication of our
edition.8
Once the motifs are identified, they are assigned to sub-classes of the
CRM class E77_Persistent_Item, which encompasses actors and things.
Here, too, the link between motifs and images is established via the
P62_depicts relation.
In an effort to open up our data model to external links, we also assign
identifiers to each motif that are commonly used in authority files such as
the Iconclass taxonomy.9 Iconclass provides a standard hierarchy for mo-
tifs and enables the connection to Linked Open Data (Kailus, 2017; Kailus
and Stein, 2018). Whereas some of the motifs we identified are easily as-
signable to the respective Iconclass identifier (e.g. ‘dog’ is connected to the
URI http://iconclass.org/34B11, ‘ladder’ to http://iconclass.org/41A343), more
specific motifs like the aforementioned pot of gnocchi can, of course, only
be referenced at a more general level. Here again, it becomes evident that the
question which motifs should be linked remains a hermeneutical one. Obvi-
ously, it does not make sense to reflect on relationships between the Diverti-
mento and all artefacts that feature the same motifs, but the use of authority
files makes it possible to exploit digital repositories as pools of connections
that could potentially be relevant from an art historical point of view. The
meaningfulness of the link must then be assessed by a human researcher.
Thus, as is the case with the syntagmatic relations, the paradigmatic net
of allusions only becomes navigable if the wealth of possible relations that
7
At the very least, the granularity of such an inventory will always be an issue given that
motifs can themselves be part of motifs.
8
This is in keeping with another distinct characteristic of digital editions: by the logic
of their medium, they are always incomplete. At least in theory, it is also easier to expand
digital editions after their publication. For an outlook of possible interactive components
for our edition, see also Section 5.
9
http://www.iconclass.org/.
302
the Divertimento offers is restricted by sorting the material according to the
specific perspectives of researchers with expert knowledge of the field, who
are capable of identifying meaningful references. Therefore, we established
nodes in our data model that represent external works of art which we regard
as relevant references, the aforementioned Grandes Misères de la guerre by
Jacques Callot being a case in point. Furthermore, we also created nodes for
specific cultural practices (e.g. the Veronese carnival tradition) that can be
linked to the motifs, a level of detail which obviously goes far beyond the
scope of the Iconclass system.10
Of course, this ‘hard-coding’ of possible relationships can only be done to
a certain extent and conflicts with the idea of a dynamic exploitation of know-
ledge resources that is a cornerstone of the Semantic Web. What becomes
obvious here is how the potential openness of the digital medium intensifies
a dilemma that accompanies all editorial work: while editions may be inten-
ded as ‘pure’ presentations of source material, it is ultimately impossible to
produce them in a non-interpretative way. Using their expertise and know-
ledge of the material, editors will arrange the sources in a meaningful way
and add explanatory context as they see fit. But in doing so, they will inev-
itably restrict the ways in which a source can be understood and promote a
perspective on the material that corresponds to their own. Digital editions
greatly facilitate the juxtaposition of divergent views on the sources, and they
also open up space for enhanced contextualization. However, as can be seen
in the case of the Divertimento, it may be sensible to restrict this space when
the connectivity of the contexts thins out too much.
Leaving such considerations aside for the moment, Figure 3 shows an
example of our modeling of motifs. Again visualized with GraphDB, it
features the motif of the gnocchi pot (‘Gnocchi-Topf’) as middle node.
The node is connected to all images that contain the motif through the
P62_depicts relation. As can be seen by their numbers, which roughly fol-
low the chronological order, the motif links drawings that are not connected
by the syntagmatic relation at all, thereby providing an alternative paradig-
matic order. This alternative order is easy to identify with the help of the
graph data structure.
The gnocchi pot node is also classified as ‘Alltagsgegenstand’ (‘every-
day object’) and connected to the corresponding Iconclass identifier, which
serves as a possible link to the resources of the net.
10
In cases such as this, possible identifiers could be retrieved with the help of Wikidata
(https://www.wikidata.org), but it is also possible to reference more specific entities like the
mentioned Veronese carnival tradition on an abstract level only.
303
Figure 3: Detail from a network visualization of the data model, centered around
the motif of the gnocchi pot
5 Front End Visualization
As we have already seen, the graph data model allows for a flexible yet struc-
tured arrangement of the material that takes into account the syntagmatic
as well as the paradigmatic relations between the drawings. Based on this
model, we have also experimented with possible ways to visualize the Diver-
timento in the web front end of our edition. In the following section, we
will discuss the potential, the semantics, and the possible limitations of our
prototype, which is still a work in progress.
In the implementation of the front end, we employ the ARC2 framework
for PHP11 to retrieve the data from the database with the help of SPARQL
queries12 and to convert the results into HTML. To enhance the visualiza-
tion of the data, we make use of the HTML Bootstrap framework13 .
An HTML carousel that successively presents all of the drawings of the
series as full-screen images in a slideshow will serve as the entry point to our
edition. The carousel simulates the act of flipping through the pages of a
printed book and recreates the impression of the drawings being taken out
of a folder to be looked at for the first time. The sequence of the carousel
follows the canonical order established in Gealt’s edition, which emphasizes
11
https://github.com/semsol/arc2
12
https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/
13
https://getbootstrap.com/
304
the syntagmatic structure of the series and draws the viewer’s attention to
the possibility of understanding the individual drawings as parts of a con-
nected narrative. However, already in this introductory display, we will also
provide a means to break up the fixed chronological structure and overcome
the restrictions of the canonical print edition: by clicking on a button, the
user can switch to a randomized version of the carousel, where the sequence
of the slideshow is selected by a random number generator. Thus, the se-
mantics of our introductory screen suggest that while there are many poten-
tial connections between the individual drawings of the Divertimento, these
connections do not necessarily produce a linear narrative – rather, there is a
multitude of different ways to approach and interpret the series.
Figure 4: Main view of the prototype front end
Clicking on one of the pictures of the slideshow takes the user to the edi-
tion’s main working view, which is shown in Figure 4. Here, the screen con-
sists of several sections.
The middle section features the selected image, together with its title and
the title of the E5_Event to which it is assigned (the example seen here shows
the title page, which is assigned to the E5_Event ‘Frontispiz’). Below the
image, all motifs captured by our data model are listed.14 As stated above,
the list of motifs can never be finished or complete. One way of addressing
this fundamental openness would be to include an interactive feature that
allows users to add motifs they consider relevant in future versions of our
front end.
14
This would also be a suitable location for additional metadata information in standard-
ized form, which has yet to be implemented.
305
At its top, the section on the right displays the events that, according to
our model, should occur after the event depicted in the selected drawing
in the center.15 However, the example also shows one of the difficulties
we encountered: as pointed out in Section 4, the title page of the series
could also be understood as its endpoint (or at least one of its endpoints),
which is why we established a P120_occurs_before relation between the last
event of the life story (‘Postmortales’) and the frontispiece. But because the
P120_occurs_before relation is transitive according to the logic of the CRM
(which, of course, makes sense given our notion of temporal sequences), this
means that the frontispiece not only occurs after ‘Postmortales,’ but also
after all other elements that precede ‘Postmortales.’ The frontispiece thus
occurs before itself, creating an endless circle of events in which every event
occurs before any other event. While this does not seem totally inappropri-
ate for the Divertimento with its tendency towards an endless generation of
meaning, it does thwart our efforts to suggest a biographical structure for
the ‘story’ of the series. In response to this challenge, we have given users the
choice to select one of the ten events in the working view of our prototype,
regardless which drawing from which event they have chosen. Since one of
the goals of our edition is to help users find plausible pathways through the
narrative, we are currently considering a modification of our data model in
this respect.
Once users have selected one of the subsequent events in the top bar of
the right section, they can flip through the pictures that are assigned to these
events in the thumbnail window below (in our example, the first – and in
this case only – drawing from the E5_Event ‘Frontispiz’ has been selected).
By clicking on the button ‘Add to story’ below this window, users can select
a specific image and add it to their own individual story, which is shown in
the left part of the screen in the section titled ‘My story’ (in our example,
four drawings have been selected; the frontispiece occurs twice, once at the
beginning, and once at the end). Thus, our edition simultaneously provides
suggestions on how a plausible narrative sequence could be assembled, while
also giving users the opportunity to find their own way through the the series.
The buttons ‘save’ and ‘carousel’ allow users to save their story and to watch
it in a slideshow.
In addition to these options for arranging the material on the syntagmatic
axis, the paradigmatic axis of the motif correspondences can also be explored:
by clicking on one of the motifs listed in the lower part of the middle section
of our main screen, users can access a view like the one shown in Figure 5.
15
The titles can be selected by clicking on one of the numbers from one to ten, which
correspond to the total amount of E5_Event nodes in our model.
306
Figure 5: Motif view of the prototype front end
Here, all drawings containing the motif of the gnocchi pot are displayed
with the arrangement of the images changing from a single row to a more
spacious tableau. It is conceivable that this form of presenting the Diver-
timento corresponds to the perspective of contemporary viewers, who may
well have spread out the drawings on a table and arranged them in different
ways, discussing the various constellations that emerged in the process.16
Links to the corresponding Iconclass identifiers are provided for each mo-
tif, which can be used as entry points into other digital resources and the web
of Linked Open Data.
6 Conclusion
In our paper, we have presented our project of a digital edition of the Diver-
timento per li regazzi, a series of drawings completed by Giovanni Domen-
ico Tiepolo between 1797 and 1804. To a certain extent, the Divertimento
can be understood as a narrative series, which, however, at times defies the
rules of linearity and allows for a multitude of potentially contradictory read-
ings. As we have shown, the Divertimento with its open structure can best be
presented by digital means of the kind successfully employed in digital text
editions. Furthermore, we have argued that graph data models are especially
apt for the task of arranging the material, because they provide a structure
that is indispensable to sort the images in a meaningful way, while also being
open and flexible enough for free exploration.
16
For a discussion of contemporaneous practices associated with the collection of prints
and drawings, see Smentek (2008), Baker et al. (2003), and Buberl (1993).
307
To meet conventional standards and thus to ensure the interoperability
and the sustainability of our data, we built our model on the basis of the
CIDOC CRM, which appears to be especially well suited to our goals, since
it is event-based and centers around temporal occurrences rather than ob-
jects. In a similar vein, we used a (constructed, hence virtual) life story of
Pulcinella as a starting point for our model, as opposed to the individual
drawings as objects. Once such an event-based ‘backbone’ is established, all
drawings, but also the motifs that establish various types of interconnections,
can be arranged around it. We also presented preliminary explorations of
how our data model could be visualized in a web front end.
At least for our use case, the CIDOC CRM has proved to be very applic-
able: all entities and relations that we needed for our model could be assigned
to existing CRM classes and almost no customization was needed. Concep-
tual problems of our model arose more out of the paradoxical characteristics
of the Divertimento itself (as in the case of the ambiguity of the frontispiece)
than out of the use of CRM or graph data.
In the future, we plan to further explore the possibilities of an interactive
web presentation that is capable of suggesting possible readings of the Di-
vertimento, while simultaneously avoiding the pitfall of limiting alternative
interpretations too strictly. A major point that has yet to be addressed is the
connection of the series to external sources. Here, we provide anchor points
for the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data with the use of authority files
like the Iconclass taxonomy. However, even though Iconclass has been avail-
able for quite a long time, it remains to be seen whether the taxonomy will
be widely accepted and used for the classification of a critical mass of digital
sources, so that the full advantage of the linking of data can be realized. As
always, meta-models like Iconclass sometimes appear to be too coarse to be
useful. This points to the more abstract problem of how to open up pos-
sible contexts without creating an information overload – a problem which
is very much open for discussion. Again, this is arguably less of a technical
problem than a conceptual one that will have to be solved hermeneutically.
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