The Other Within: Iconographic Representations of the Self and the Other in the Haggadah (1350-1950)
Débora Marques de Matos (Institute for Jewish Studies/University of Münster)
https://www.uni-muenster.de/Religion-und-Politik/en/forschung/projekte/A3-9.shtml
‘The Other Within’ is a Digital Humanities research project currently developed at the Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics and the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Münster, Germany. It is funded by the Cluster of Excellence and the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for a duration of three years (2019-2021). The project’s first focus is on the development and consolidation of digital methods relevant to visual artefacts, such as distant and close viewing as well as synchrony and diachrony. It also intends to reconsider previous art historical methods such as formalism in light of DH approaches. The second focus concerns the implementation of these methods in the analysis of iconographic representations of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in illustrated Haggadot from 1350 up to 1950. The application of these methods using data visualisation techniques allows for the identification of iconographic patterns in a large corpus of Haggadot, which in turn will contribute to the understanding of complex phenomena such as cross-cultural contacts and artistic entanglements.
The Haggadah is an outstanding case-study. In its long history, it has been frequently edited, commented upon, translated, and amply illustrated. In the process, artists inevitably absorbed (and rejected) cultural and artistic influences, while sharpening the Jewishness of the book. One of the innovative aspects of this project is, precisely, the chronological and geographical range of the corpus. So far, we have identified more than 1000 items, although part are reprints or new editions. The items were copied and printed in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and the Americas, and they comprise a variety of languages and scripts/types.
The chronological and regional diversity of such a corpus is manageable through digital techniques and methods. In this project, book illustration is approached through the annotation of digital surrogates and generation of metadata in the process, then analysed with access to data visualisation tools. First, an ontology was developed using Protégé (http://protege.stanford.edu/). Roughly speaking, an ontology is a formalistic and hierarchal organisation of knowledge that allows the retrieval of information. The organisation of knowledge opens a relevant discussion for art historians on the recuperation of methods such as formalism within DH. The ontology was then used for image markup and to generate metadata. In practical terms, this meant creating short descriptions such as tags for each image and its components (in other words, data about data). Images were annotated using Archetype (https://archetype.ink), a digital tool initially developed for palaeography but successfully used for visual artefacts as well, and now in the process of being substantially improved for the latter. Once all of the images are annotated, metadata will be imported into Tableau (https://www.tableau.com), a data visualisation software.
The analysis of metadata is best described as hybrid and integrative. On the one hand, it applies digital methods to visual materials such as distant and close viewing. These methods have been inspired by Franco Moretti’s concept of distant reading in literary studies (cf. https://newleftreview.org/issues/II1/articles/franco-moretti-conjectures-on-world-literature). Methodological inspiration has also been found in linguistics, specifically in the Saussurean concepts of synchrony and diachrony. These are complementary methods that enable the analysis of the overarching ‘life’ of iconographic patterns and their modulation in specific clusters (defined by a timeframe and location). On the other hand, the analysis goes back to and integrates previous scholarship, which mostly applies to clusters (e.g. medieval Haggadot). The analysis will corroborate previous findings and offer new insights, particularly concerning the overarching ‘life’ of iconographic patterns and their respective modulation, irrespective of time and space.
Finally, the project deliberately takes advantage of tools already validated by the DH community rather than emphasising tool development. While an automated or computer-vision approach was initially considered, iconographic variation, the fragility of materials and costs involved would require an extensive period for preparing the tools. From a non-DH perspective, DH projects sometimes end up spending too much time on tools, and, as a consequence, it may look as if scholarship had not been sufficiently foregrounded. A primary concern for short-term projects such as ours is, therefore, to communicate methods and results. As such, the ontology, methodological discussion and results will be made available to the academic community for a wider discussion with DH practitioners and experts in the Haggadah.