Maximilian SCHICH
(Munich, Germany)
Goal:
Traditionally ‘very old’ archaeological research, that was conducted before the ‘birth of archaeology’ in the 18th century is treated separately from modern sources within Archaeology. As a consequence it is hard to explicate implicit dependencies of modern research on ‘very old’ sources. My lecture will provide a solution to this problem.
Method:
I‘ve overcome the problem by analyzing and integrating a large mass of data concerning the visual documentation of Imperial Baths in Rome. The relevant material was collected from modern archaeological and art historical literature, photo libraries and the ‚Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance‘. For the integration of the data, I have constructed a semantic-web-like data storage, in which the division of modern literature and visual resources from Renaissance documents, as found in the ‚Census‘, is abolished.
Result:
Main result of the subsequent analysis is the fact, that reception and transmission of visual information constitute complex networks in the sense of discrete mathematics. Implicit chains of transmission often go back much further than the explicit citations of modern Archaeology. In my lecture, I will focus on another result, that follows from my investigation: As visual transmission is ‚implicit‘ in modern products of archaeology, just like in old sources, uncertainty isn‘t just a property of the older products. Any source, no matter how old, has to be analyzed within it‘s own convention. Only subsequently it is possible to translate the material into another framework. In other words, we must collect data without distorting it, which puts into question any fixed convention of data storage, for e.g. the modern paradigm of geographic space.
Keywords: document convention, uncertainty, implicit citations, data model, semantic web