Visual Knowledge: Textual Iconography of the Quixote, a Hypertextual Archive
Eduardo Urbina
e-urbina@tamu.edu
Texas A&M University
Richard Furuta
furuta@cs.tamu.edu
Texas A&M University
Steven Escar Smith
ssmith@lib-gw.tamu.edu
Texas A&M University
At present, there is no catalogue, in print or online, covering in a
comprehensive manner the textual iconography of the Quixote. Attempts were made
in 1879 and 1895 to offer a representative sampling but the coverage is very
limited in both cases, amounting in the former to 101 illustrations from 60
selected editions, and to 23 plates from a single edition in the latter.
[Note 1: Iconografía de Don Quixote; reproducción heliográfica y tipográfica de
101 láminas elegidas entre las 60 ediciones, diversamente ilustradas, que se
han publicado durante 257 años...destinadas a la primera edición de Don Quijote
(Barcelona: P. Riera, 1879).
Catálogo de la exposición celebrada en la
Biblioteca Nacional en el tercer centenario de la publicación del Quijote
(Madrid, 1905);
Exposición cervantina en la Biblioteca Nacional para conmemorar
el CCCXXX aniversario de la muerte de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Madrid,
1946); Juan Givanel Mas,
Catálogo de la exposición de iconografía cervantina
(Barcelona, 1944).]
Two key obstacles have prevented the publication of a comprehensive collection
or archive based on the textual iconography of the Quixote: 1) the rarity of
and difficult access to the materials, and 2) the technical and financial
difficulties in compiling and disseminating such an archive in print format.
The advent of hypertext, digital libraries, and the Internet, among other
technological factors of the information technology revolution, make the
impossible dream of visualizing the Quixote a realizable goal. Nevertheless,
there remain still considerable obstacles and challenges if the result is to be
both effective and valuable as an educational tool and a research resource in
the humanities.
In this context, the Cervantes Project (CP) has under way the creation of a
fully accessible, searchable and documented electronic database and digital
archive of all the illustrations that form the textual iconography of the
Quixote, as permitted by copyright limitations, along with the necessary
interfaces and visualization tools to allow for the kind of access and study
until now unavailable.
[Note 2: The Cervantes Project (CP) is an ongoing long-term project and research initiative dedicated to the development of a comprehensive digital archive
based on the works of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), the cornerstone of
Hispanic letters and one of the world's most influential authors. In
partnership with the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries and the Cushing
Memorial Library and Archives, a division of the Texas A&M University
Libraries, our goal is to create an online repository of textual, documentary,
bibliographic, and visual electronic resources to serve the needs of students
and scholars interested in Cervantes' life, times and work, and focused in
particular on the study of Don Quixote de la Mancha
().]
We further envision the archive as a research
depository to complement the textual and bibliographical electronic resources
already present in the CP, as well as a unique digital variorum image
collection able to extend the value of our Electronic variorum edition of the
Quixote, initiated in 1999. The archive will allow worldwide electronic access
to these unique and rare textual and graphic resources by scholars, students,
and users interested in Cervantes' work and the influence of his masterpiece
through 400 years from several perspectives: textual, artistic, critical,
bibliographical, and historical.
In the last few years, critical interest on the illustrations of the Quixote
has been renewed as demonstrated by the publication of three major monographs
by J. Hartau, R. Paulson, and R. Schmidt.
[Note 3: Johannes Hartau, Don Quijote in der Kunst: Wandlungen einer Symbolfigur (Berlin: Mann, 1987); Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England: the Aesthetics of
Laughter (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998); Rachel Schmidt, Critical
Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the
Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1999).]
Of equal significance is the recent exhibition at the
Museo del Prado in Madrid entitled Images of Don Quixote, as well as the richly
illustrated and documented catalogue of the exhibition prepared under the
direction of Patrick Lenaghan, Curator of prints at the Hispanic Society of
America in New York.
[Note 4: Patrick Lenaghan, together with Javier Blas y José Manuel Matilla, Imágenes del Quijote: Modelos de representación en las ediciones de los siglos XVII a XIX (Madrid: Hispanic Society of America-Museo Nacional del Prado-Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Calcografía Nacional, 2003). See also the catalogue prepared for another related exhibition, El Quijote ilustrado: Modelos de representación en las ediciones españolas del siglo XVIII y comienzos del XIX (Madrid: Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte-Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 2003), which visited Texas A&M University in March-April 2004 during the celebration of Spain Week.]
These studies and events place the illustrations in new
and diverse cultural, aesthetic and historical contexts, demonstrating their
key critical value and role in the reception and interpretation of the novel,
and make evident the urgent need to provide a more complete and accessible
resource to the rich artistic tradition of the textual iconography of the
Quixote in order to better understand its significant contribution to the
editorial history and critical reception of Cervantes' novel still largely
unknown to readers and unexamined by critics.
The main rare book collection supporting our project is the Cervantes Project (CP)
Collection at the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives of Texas A&M
University. In recent years, the Cervantes Project (CP) and the Cushing Memorial
Library have acquired a large number of significant illustrated editions for
the purpose of creating a special collection of illustrated editions of the
Quixote. At present (November 2004) the Quixote textual iconography collection
includes 352 editions, published since 1620. The collection comprises over 650
volumes and is concentrated in 18th and 19th century English, French, and
Spanish illustrated editions. We estimate the digital archive of the collection
will eventually include upwards of 8,000 images and a fully searchable database
complemented by innovative visualization tools.
[Note 5: Carlos Monroy et al. Texts, Images, Knowledge: Visualizing Cervantes and Picasso. Proceedings Visual Knowledges Conference. John Frow, ed. University
of Edinburgh: Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities,
2003. .]
An important component of our initial work is the specification of a
comprehensive taxonomy of the episodes, adventures, themes and characters in
the Quixote. The taxonomy, representing the logical narrative structure of the
work, will provide the addressing mechanism by which illustrations, texts, and
other components can be associated with one another automatically. Through
manipulation of the structure of the taxonomic elements and through
specification of the desired interrelationships, hypotheses about the work can
be posed and examined through coordinated inspection of text, illustration,
commentary, and bibliography.
Specifically for the Cervantes Project, an XML schema, compatible with the TEI
DTD, is being created representing the complex and highly significant
interrelationships of episodes and adventures traceable throughout the entire
text of Don Quixote as identified and tagged in our narrative taxonomy. In the
first phase of the textual iconography project, one base text of the Quixote is
being fully encoded in TEI XML. Given the bilingual nature of our site and the
international scope of its users, we next plan to encode J. Ormsby's English
translation, already available in our digital library of electronic texts.
Since this mark-up will include elements created by project staff to represent
the various episodes, adventures, themes and motifs present in the narrative,
these texts will provide an even richer searching opportunity for Cervantes
scholars and will allow the subsequent incorporation of other key
critical/textual editions.
The Cervantes Iconography project represents a close collaboration among four
administrative groups on the Texas A&M University campus-Cervantes scholars
based in the Hispanic Studies Department, professional staff members from the
Texas A&M University Libraries, Information Science researchers from the Center
for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL), and digital imaging specialists from
the Texas A&M University Digital Library (TAMUDL), as diagrammed in Figure 1.
Three separate representations of the collection are maintained at
present-an edition master list (maintained in Hispanic Studies), a production
collection (maintained in the A&M Libraries), and a research collection
(maintained in the CSDL). The edition master list (Figure 2) serves as a master
index and is imported by the two collections. As editions are digitized, the
collected images are distributed simultaneously to both collections. The
production collection maintains a set of Dublin-core-based metadata records,
which are kept for each edition (Figure 3) and for each image of interest
within each image (Figure 4). These metadata fields initially are populated
from the master list and are augmented with additional information as the
edition is catalogued, imaged, and associated with the comprehensive taxonomy.
The research collection currently provides a Web-based "proofing" interface
(illustrated in Figure 5 and accessible from our Web pages at
) for the purpose of allowing quick browsing
and searching of the growing collection.
[Figure 1]
[Figure 2]
[Figure 3]
[Figure 4]
[Figure 5]
At the time of writing, the project has been ongoing for about a year and a
half. The first year's activities focused on defining the metadata fields and
imaging standards. The TAMUDL's imaging work began with test scans in Fall
2003, and currently is reaching production levels. To date, 32 editions have
been imaged locally and another 15 obtained from other sources (the Library of
Congress and the Spanish National Library), with a total of 1659 images
currently available.
The added value of the illustrations in the Quixote textual iconography digital
archive derive in particular from their innovative treatment and relationship
with the collection of electronic text available already at the CP and in the
linkages allowing connectivity between images, metadata, and bibliography
entries. In addition, the archive provides interactivity between digital
images and electronic texts, from different entry points. For example, one can
browse single images, images with same metadata in a given field (content),
sequential images from same edition, or all images related to a particular
chapter or adventure by same artist or in the same edition. We also plan to
develop a tool to compare, juxtapose and collage related images from several
editions, artists, etc., as part of our research to create new approaches and
techniques to display images for analysis, beyond browsing and searching; in
that connection we will expand archival description methods, and advance ways
in which to integrate texts and images with metadata, as previously done for
the images included in the electronic variorum edition of the Quixote.
The digital images, electronic databases, hypertextual archive, and
visualizations tools to be created will be fully accessible free of charge
through customized interfaces at the Internet portal of the Cervantes Project,
as well as, in Spanish, through the portals of the National Library of Spain
and the University of Castilla-La Mancha. The wide interdisciplinary interest
in the Quixote throughout the centuries, its canonical and seminal status in
the creation of the novel as a genre, its traditional inclusion in world
literature courses, and its iconic status in Hispanic culture, are all factors
insuring that the potential audience for the reference materials to be made
available by our proposed project will be large, constant, and varied. It will
include scholars in literary and book history interested in evaluating the
reception and development of the written and visual text, students of the novel
and of illustrations researching the role and function of iconography in
narrative, and curious readers interested in seeing and appreciating for the
first time a rich artistic tradition.
[Note 6: We provide a more complete acknowledgement of the many participants in this project at ]
Bibliography
Riera, P.
Iconografía de Don Quixote; reproducción heliográfica y foto-tipográfica de
101 láminas elegidas entre las 60 ediciones, diversamente ilustradas, que se
han publicado durante 257 años...destinadas a la primera edición de Don Quijote
Barcelona
1879
Cat expos Quijote
Biblioteca Nacional
Madrid
1905
Expos Miguel de Cervantes
Biblioteca Nacional
Madrid
1946
Mas, Juan Givanel
Catálogo de la exposición de Iconografía cervantina
Biblioteca Central
Barcelona
1944
Cervantes Project
Hartau, Johannes
Don Quijote in der Kunst: Wandlungen einer Symbolfigur
Mann
Berlin
1987
Paulson, Ronald
Don Quixote in England: the Aesthetics of Laughter
The Johns Hopkins UP
Baltimore
1998
Schmidt, Rachel
Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the
Eighteenth Century
McGill-Queen's UP
Montreal
1999
Lenaghan, Patrick
Blas, Javier
Matilla, José Manuel
Imágenes del Quijote: Modelos de representación en las ediciones de los siglos XVII a
XIX
Calcografía Nacional
Madrid
2003
El Quijote ilustrado
Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte-Real
Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando
Madrid
2003
Monroy, Carlos, et al.
Texts, Images, Knowledge: Visualizing Cervantes and Picasso
Frow, John
Proceedings of the Visual Knowledges Conference
University of Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
2003
csdl.tamu.edu