Digital Heraldry is a research project in the field of Digital History, adopting methods from computer science to enhance research in historical studies.
Coats of arms were the most common visual medium of the Middle Ages and Early Modern times. They could mark and communicate territorial dominion, societal rank as well as family or other group identity. They interconnected individual persons, social groups, dominions and artefacts. Coats of arms appeared in handwritten medieval manuscripts and official documents as well on wall paintings, carvings, stained glass and seals. They could either be displayed as images or as accurate textual descriptions. Thereby coats of arms acted as a fundamental medium of medieval and ealry modern communication. It’s study is essential in widening our understanding of cultures and societies on the European continent in the premodern era.
Nevertheless coats of arms have been mostly overlooked or even ignored in their relevance by historiographic research. This seems inevitable, considering the reasons for this: Firstly, the historian is confronted with a vast amount of coats of arms. Secondly, the places were coats of arms can be found, as well as their contexts of usage are very different and heterogenous. And finally, heraldry in itself, with its rules of design and its quais-semiotic system adds an additional layer of complexity to coats of arms as a historic source.
The project Digital Heraldry aims to adress these shortcomings by connecting historical research questions, competences in historical auxillary sciences and methods from computer science. The goal is, firstly, to collect digitized historical sources as unstructured data (in the form of images and texts) and secondly enabling the semi-automatical description and identification of coats of arms. To achieve this, methods of Machine Learning and Semantic Web Technologies are being used.
In doing so, the project is not only working on enhancing historical and cultural studies, but also utilizes it’s unique and extensive material to further develope methods of computer science.
Digital Heraldry is coordinated by the university chair of Digital History at the Humboldt-University of Berlin.
Digital History
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Digital History
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Digital History
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Computer Vision and Machine Learning
University of Münster
Digital History
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Digital History
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Digital History
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Digital History
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Presentation Héraldique à l'ère numérique : Exploration des armoriaux au moyen de nouvelles approches informatisées à échelle variable at the conference Colloque international sur l’héraldique, December 4th - 5th.
Presentation Revisiting Armorials through a Conceptual Lense. The Digital Heraldry Ontology as an approach to study heraldry in manuscripts and other sources at the conference Colloque international sur l’héraldique, December 4th - 5th.
Paper The History of Heraldry Revisited. Introducing the Digital Heraldry Ontology to describe, contextualise, and analyse medieval and early modern coats of arms in Genealogica & Heraldica XXXV. Reformation, Revolution, Restauration. Proceedings of the Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences (Cambridge) (edited by Paul A. Fox).
Hands-on Workshop on the Digital Heraldry Research Environment at the conference Colloquium of the International Academy of Heraldry, August 16th - 19th.
Creation of a first usable prototype of a web interface to search and enter data in the
Presentation Coats of Arms Entangled in Their Contexts: The Representation and Analysis of the Use of Coats of Arms in the Middle Ages with the Digital Heraldry Ontology at the conference IMC Leeds 2023, July 3th - 6th.
Presentation ‘Hybrid AI’ as an aid to interpret visual sources? The application of semantic web technologies and machine learning to analyse heraldic communication in pre-modern manuscripts at the conference Digital History 2023, May 24th - 26th.
Presentation Knowledge Graph Design in der Forschungspraxis. Beschreibung, Interpretation und Kontextualisierung heraldischer Quellen mit der Digital Heraldry Ontology at the conference DHd2023 Open Humanities Open Culture, March 13th - 17th.
Presentation The history of heraldry revisited. Computer-assisted analysis of the development of the composition of coats of arms in the Middle Ages and Early modern times at the conference Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences, August 15th - 19th.
Short presentation When context matters. How to explore a knowledge graph of heraldic communication and its contexts of use in medieval and early modern Europe with methods such as graph embedding at the conference Digital Humanities 2022 Tokyo, July 25th - 29th.
Presentation Digital Methods in Practice. From Medial to Conceptual Digitality. Digital Heraldry Ontology at the workshop Data for History. Semantic models for cultural heritage data. From embedded markup to ontologies, June 07th - 08th.
Presentation Mind the Gap! Graph-based Modelling of Incompleteness in Historical Sources Using the Example of Medieval Armorials on Murals at the conference Datafication in the Historical Humanities. Reconsidering Traditional Understandings of Sources and Data, June 02nd - 04th.
Conference presentation Introducing the Digital Heraldry Ontology. A new approach to encode and share coats of arms on seals and other objects as Linked Open Data at the Workshop Euroseal. Reflections on sigillographic Databases in Europe, May 19th - 20th.
Publishing version 0.1.0 of the Digital Heraldry Ontology as well as the first dataset of descriptions of coats of arms.
Presentation Kontextwissen zu historischen Quellen im Semantic Web. Die computergestützte Analyse heraldischer Wand- und Deckenmalereien mit Hilfe von Background Knowledge at the conference DHd2022. Kulturen des digitalen Gedächtnisses, March 07th - 11th.
Presentation Putting visual sources into context: Towards an ontology to analyze medieval heraldic murals and ceiling paintings at the Data for History Lecture series, February 9th.
Conference presentation Automated Processing and Exploitation of Heraldic Data from European Archives at the Workshop Innovation on new digital exponential technologies in the Archives, September 2th - 3th.
Conference presentation Heraldry as a Historical Source to Conceptualize Medieval Spaces and Agents: From Historiographic Concepts to Data Modelling Approaches Data for History 2021. Modeling Time, Places, Agents, May 19th - June 30th.
Conference presentation Detection, Description, Analysis. Towards an integrated approach to heraldic representations on seals using Machine Learning and Semantic Web Technologies on the Linked Pasts 6, December 2th - 16th.
Paper Digital Heraldry. The State of the Art and New Approaches Based on Semantic Web Technologies in L’édition en ligne de documents d’archives médiévaux (edited by Christelle Balouzat-Loubet).
Conference presentation Friends with Benefits: Wie Deep-Learning basierte Bildanalyse und kulturhistorische Heraldik voneinander profitieren on the DHd2020 Paderborn, March 2th - 6th.
The Digital Heraldry Ontology enables the encoding of coats of arms, based on the practices of blazoning. This is done by regarding coats of arms as conceptual objects (rather than images or textual representations), composed in a specific way of figures, tinctures, and geometric patterns. In this way, any combination of coats of arms can be created in a machine-readable way. Thereby, the ontology can be used as a controlled vocabulary to annotate and semantically describe coats of arms e.g. on different material objects, which then can be uniquely referenced as Linked Data.
Documentation and Download: http://digitalheraldry.org/digital-heraldry-ontology/heraldry
Current Version: 0.1.0
This dataset contains descriptions of coats of arms, structured with the heraldry ontology. Each description has an URI as a unique identifier. They can be used to assign representations of coats of arms in images or texts to a heraldic description, structured by the Digital Heraldry Ontology.
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Departement of History
University Chair for Digital History
Unter den Linden 6
10099 Berlin