Of Dames, of Knights, of armes, of loves delight,
Of courtesies, of high attempts I speake
The Orlando furioso is one of the most important poems of the Italian literary tradition. It was written by Ludovico Ariosto in the first half of the 16th century and describes a particularly intricated plot, focused on different characters. It is considered to be the prosecution of another similar poem, the Orlando Innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo, an epic poem published few decades before. The narrative structure of the Orlando Furioso, indeed, is focused on three main aspects:
Ludovico Ariosto spent most of his life in the territories now corresponding to the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna: he was born in Reggio Emilia in 1474 and his father, who was originary of Bologna, was at the service of the House of Este in Ferrara. This link with the Duchy of Ferrara will be stronger for Ariosto, as in 1503 he started working for the cardinal Ippolito d’Este: this important relationship will deeply influence the professional life and the opera omnia of the Italian writer.
Beyond its services for the House of Este, Ariosto played a crucial role for Italian language and culture. For instance, its Orlando Furioso mirrored the new grammatical rules for italian writers set by Pietro Bembo in the work Prose nelle quali si ragiona della volgar lingua. Bembo's collaboration was relevant in the stylistic corrections Ariosto made to the different editions of his Orlando Furioso (first edition in 1516, second in 1521, third in 1532). Several episodes of this poem became extremely famous and have been reinterpreted by many authors and artists over the centuries.
This knowledge organization project aims at portraying through the tools of linked open data (LOD) the cultural humus surrounding the production of the Orlando furioso and providing an anthology of the most relevant reinterpretation of Ariosto’s masterpiece through different media and artistic languages from the Cinquecento to present days. To accomplish this objective, we opted for eleven items, preserved by different LAM institutions:
Genius Bononiaekeeps a flyer promoting this performance in Piazza Maggiore, in Bologna in 1969
Genius Bononiaekeeps a flyer promoting this performance in Piazza Maggiore, in Bologna in 1969
We defined the core idea of the project and selected an adequate number of items from different LAM institutions which are linked to Ariosto’s masterpiece in different ways. Later, each item was described and identified thanks to a link to the hosting institution online catalog.
We tried to reorganize the items and their related information with a conceptual map, an ad hoc graphical representation highlighting links among different items and entities.
The E/R provides a further step of abstraction rather then the conceptual map. The relationship between items and the identified entities are hence translated into a set of more general triple statements.
We checked for each item the corresponding description provided by the insititution. We later collected metadata according to the most adequate standard. The different properties and their translation in the different standards are later aligned in general tables.
We interpreted the collected data through a theoretical model, i.e. a graphical representation of the domain which expresses in natural language the information concerning agents, places, dates and subjects/concepts.
Later, we developed a conceptual model, a more formal representation relying on an ontological approach (i.e. through the reuse of existing schemas, vocabularies, and ontologies).
Following the structure of the conceptual model, we described all our items in terms of triples: subject, predicate, object. These statements are formalized into a RDF Turtle serialization, which allows to model and visualize the studied domain.
DHDK student
University of Bologna
DHDK student
University of Bologna
DHDK student
University of Bologna