Abstract:

Hundreds of artists have illustrated the Quixote for almost 400 years. These illustrations re-imagine the text and aim to create visual representations capable of capturing complex narrative meanings, settings, and characterizations; they are both a useful critical device and an effective tool to represent in visual terms the often-illusory reality depicted by the words in the page.

Starting in 2003 with initial support from a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we have created the first comprehensive digital archive based on the illustrations of the Quixote, taken from over 1,000 key editions published between 1640 and 2010: the "Textual Iconography of the Quixote" (http://dqi.tamu.edu). The archive contains over 50,000 high-resolution images fully indexed and documented. Beyond the goal of recovering the illustrated history of the Quixote, our objectives are a) to provide finding aids to make the archive a critical research tool, and b) to develop new visualization approaches and hybrid text/image editions to support the teaching of the Quixote in the digital age.

Our project is interdisciplinary and collaborative in the area of Digital Humanities. It brings together experts from Literature, Art History, Digital Libraries and Computer Science. We present here the textual taxonomy created for encoding sections of the text representing the various episodes and adventures consisting of 400 elements. This taxonomy, representing the logical narrative structure of the work in visual terms, provides the addressing mechanism by which illustrations, texts, and metadata can be associated with one-another automatically. Through manipulation of the structure of the taxonomic elements and through the use of appropriate mark-up language and tags we plan to connect the text to the images in a fully integrated and accessible manner.

Keywords:

Quixote, illustrations, taxonomy, metadata, teaching.