Lecture: The Digital Heraldry Project. A Knowledge Graph with Semantic Web Technologies and Machine Learning to study medieval visual sources

Philipp Schneider will present the Digital Heraldry Project at the DH AI Seminar at the Centre Sciences des Données at the École Normale Supérieure on Tuesday, 9 January 2024.

Visual communication forms an important part of medieval and early modern european culture. Especially coats of arms were widely used in different social groups and offer an important source for cultural history. This subject is at the center of the Digital Heraldry Project. Here, we created a Knowledge Graph with Semantic Web Technologies to (1) describe coats of arms, (2) trace their use over different types of historical sources and objects and link them to their images, (3) place these objects in their historical context of use, and (4) trace how and by whom coats of arms were used on these objects. Furthermore, the ontologies created for this Knowledge Graph are able to account for multiperspectivity regarding the description and interpretation of the historical sources it represents.

The talk will give an overview on the project and its results with regard to the field of Digital History. Although mainly focusing on the parts of the project, dealing with symbolic AI, the presentation will also touch upon the integration of large image corpora into the Knowledge Graph through Machine Learning.

General information:

The talk will take place at

Tuesday, 9 January 2024, 10h-12h (Paris time)

École Normale Supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris Centre Sciences des Données (3ème étage près de l’escalier C / 3rd floor by stairway C) and via Zoom: https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/98950781563?pwd=aTVCVU9nYXBOVFlKV3UreG1idnFhZz09

Infos: https://dhai-seminar.github.io/