[CfA:] Digital Heraldry: Digitisation and Dissemination of the European Heraldic Heritage | Heraldica Nova

"Heraldry is a historical phenomenon that is unique to Europe, and therefore heraldry constitutes a crucial part of a mutual European cultural identity. From Scandinavia to Cyprus, from Portugal to Romania, throughout France, Germany, Poland, Italy—after its emergence in the twelfth century, heraldry had soon spread across almost the entire continent. Coats of arms were to be found in manuscripts, on walls and ceilings, in stained glass and panel paintings, on seals and coins as well as on objects of all kind. More than any other cultural achievement, coats of arms have the capacity to link objects, places and families into a network connecting the various parts of Europe, and to provide at the same time revealing perspectives in medieval and early modern culture, mentalities, and uses of communication that have been hitherto largely overlooked. Coats of arms thus have an enormous potential for understanding European history and the formation of our European culture. Heraldry is a crucial part of the daily work of libraries, archives, and museums, in fact everyone involved in the preservation of cultural heritage. At the same time, it is a subject with an intrinsic potential for interdisciplinary research, including history, art history, archaeology, philology and linguistics, numismatics, sphragistics etc. However, the complexity of heraldry and its language, the sheer amount of evidences as well as the largely outdated tools make it difficult to access so far. Because of the geographical fragmentation of sources across various regional and national institutions, it is next to impossible to reveal the ‘bigger picture’ of a single coat of arms’ material context. Our cross-disciplinary project, so far consisting of historians from the University of Münster and computer scientists from the University of Leipzig, sets out to change this. We are convinced that the Digital Humanities will enable us to overcome those obstacles and give us the means for a rapprochement of heraldry on a totally new level. Relying on Ontology Engineering and Linked Open Data technology, our project aims to enable anyone to conveniently identify and study coats of arms without the previous heraldic knowledge. By incorporating already available online data from cultural heritage institutions all over Europe, our project will furthermore offer the possibility to locate any coat of arms in its material contexts and to reveal hitherto unknown links between different cultural objects and areas, opening up the subject for new tracks for research. In this effort, the project aims to tackle these specific tasks ..."