Digital Hermeneutics and Intangible Cultural Heritage

Scientific lead: Alessandro Adamou

The DH Lab has finalized the collaboration with the University of Lausanne and EPFL on the CROSSINGS project, aiming at formally representing the immaterial aspects of knowledge that can be derived from modeling the world of endangered Southern Chinese martial arts, resulting in the first documented networked ontology of martial arts with guidelines for singling out its immaterial aspects.

The strand of research concerning the representation of human experience has continued in the direction of abstracting the modeling efforts carried out in the contexts of music history and literature history with the goal of building and evaluating the first general pattern-based model of aesthetic experience resulting from the engagement with art. This endeavor also branched off into another strand of research that covers digital hermeneutics in the interpretation of visual art, with particular regard to the BHMPI’s holdings. The initial results of this latter strand, arising from a user study on depictions of scenes from the Trojan war present in our Photographic Collection, and compared to emotion mining performed over the IconClass classification system, were published in October 2024.