Fashion History by Entities: Artworks, Garments and Events

Posted on 15/11/2022 by Peter Tessel

On the 5th of October we hosted the second meetup in the context of the group 'Using Knowledge Graphs in Cultural Heritage'. Information scientist/art historian Linda Freyberg and web/information designer Giacomo Nanni from the Urban Complexity Lab in Potsdam presented their research project Restaging Fashion.

The aim of this project is to develop new visualizations of historical dress that art historians can use in their research on the cultural history of clothing, its appearance and (symbolic) character. At its core are the paintings and miniatures from the art collection of Franz and Frieda von Lipperheide which are linked to prints and drawings, textual sources and 3D images of a selection of historical garments from the textile collection of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.

During the meetup Linda and Giacomo presented how they have combined these separate data sources into a knowledge graph: the thesauri they selected to link the entities in their data to (GND, ICONCLASS and AAT), the ontology they chose to describe the entities (CIDOC CRM) and the CMS they used to generate linked open data (Omeka S). Next they showed some visualizations of the resulting semantic network they used internally to test their API and to check the digitization workflow and the modeling in general. Finally Linda and Giacomo presented some sketches of narrative approaches they plan to develop further in the remainder of the project.

The Restaging Fashion project is now entering its final year in which the team will focus on the challenge of making the huge semantic network visible and comprehensible for art historians. We are curious about the final outcome and will keep you posted.

@Linda and @Giacomo: thank you for sharing your experience and knowledge! @you, the reader: if you would like to discuss your project in which you are 'Using Knowledge Graphs in Cultural Heritage', let us know!