Online Presence of the Corpus of Ancient Sarcophagi
The Cast Collection of the Academic Museum of Art of the University of Bonn is to be documented photographically and integrated into an image database that is usable from Cologne and Bonn. The scientific foci of the Archaeological Institutes of Cologne and Bonn and thus be brought closer by two institutions that are characterized by Greek and Roman art: the Cast Collection in Bonn and the Research Archive in Cologne. The Cast Collection Bonn is one of the largest in all of Europe, the Research Archive in Cologne owns the largest specialized photography collection in the field of ancient sculpture. Teaching in Cologne improved a lot by gaining access to an important resource of the University of Bonn in the field of Greek art through the image database.
With their help, the local data could be enlarged and presentations, papers, magister and dissertation thesis could be prepared as computer work. The image database is also supposed to be implemented in the Academic Museum of Art in order to mirror the cast collection in an electronic museum and allow a new form of access. Aside from the merging of data on Greek and Roman sculpture, reciprocal additions of the media are an aim. Photographs and casts are used as a fundamental material in teaching. Whereas casts have the benefit of being a three dimensional copy of the original work, photographs can be collected in a much larger scale and are more fit for documentation and establishment of comparisons. The side and back view of monuments that are essential to comparisons can be documented much easier with cast than with the original. Casts allow a better understanding of the three-dimensional form of the object than it is possible with photographs because of their unpredictable shading. If they are photographed in evenly distributed light, they can show important insight on specific problems of research and also allow better comparisons than heterogeneous photographs. Thus, the usability of both media with their specific properties for teaching is not ensured and still lacking. The photographic documentation is going to be accompanied by student work groups that form sensible groups of the casts in Bonn and prepare the content for database entries. By doing this, the students have the possibility to improve the resources of teaching at universities. A didactic line was continued that not only focused on topics of the research archive or the cast collection. Unrelated to regular types of courses, a student lead tutorial as well as a student media work group was formed as a part of the university tutorial program of the state. The students were able to contribute to the definition of central topics of teaching independently as an initiative to form a binding vocabulary on images. The results of these considerations are also integrated into the new study program. The lack of accessibility and understanding of images has often been a hindering. Many of the efforts of the project could still be picked up.
Supervision: Prof. Dr. Reinhard Förtsch, Prof. Dr. Henner von Hesberg
The Research Archive participates in the new conception of the Corpus of Ancient Sarcophagi as a part of a cooperation with the German Archaeological Institute and is responsible for the technological back up of a coherent online accessibility of the material. The Corpus was designed in the year 1870 by the German Archaeological Institute as a collection and publication of sarcophagi of the Roman imperial age. In the first experimental phase, which was financed by the University of Cologne and the DAI, an adequate software technological structuring is to be drafted and trialed on select categories. For this, the large and sometimes already digitalized photo holdings on ancient sarcophagi of the research archive can be used.
Making the recyclability of the material and the formalization an editorial principle is a first maxim. Thus far, the editing of the volumes was structured in a way that the summarizing of documentation of literature and photographs was done by each author himself/herself. Because of this an overarching object collection or index is missing. This creates a serious conceptional deficit because the collected information, which is not in the same format as the already published volumes, is lost. This makes it an editorial problem that is only increased by the advancing digitalization of information. The material documentation will be formalized in ARACHNE for all new volumes so that the person bound change in the editing can be overcome much easier and that at least the produced information can be accessed through the database for research, even If the project is not finished.
The second maxim is the textual conception of the web presence, in which the content-based, functional and regional-agricultural context are further taken into account than with the previously used principle, which has been changed only a bit since the 19th century. This concept examines each mythological figure or type after the other.
The basis is a “fixed” website of the Sarcophaguscorpus of the DAI. It contains “fixed” sites with a persistent URL for each volume:
- For already published volumes, the automatically associated new finds from ARACHNE that only became known after the publishing of the volume
- For already published volumes a successively retrospective digitalization of the published material
- For newly published volumes with automatically associated comprehensive documentation of the material from ARACHNE
- “fixed” sites with a persistent URL for the navigation only within the collection of sarcophagi
- by functional contexts, regions, chronological criteria, topic or combinations of those 4 categories
In a future perspective these materials of the Sarcophaguscorpus are highlighted by several criteria: tradition, international meaning, homogeneity in the category of the material, high measure of chronological and textual identifiability of single objects, ability to contextualized of scenes with several figures. They make up an especially suitable field to display the special structures of discourse in the web by the use of metadata models that stem from information technologies.
Link: Corpus der Antiken Sarkophage
Supervision: Prof. Dr. Ortwin Dally, Prof. Dr. Reinhard Förtsch, Prof. Dr. Henner v. Hesberg
Cooperation: German Archaeological Institute (DAI)