Titulo Estágio
Chat-bot Mobile App for Emblem Identification in Artworks
Áreas de especialidade
Sistemas de Informação
Local do Estágio
Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Polo II - Pinhal de Marrocos 3030-290 Coimbra
Enquadramento
Emblems are currently used as bimedial compositions that combine image and text in order to convey a symbolic meaning. The origin of this practice goes back to 1531, when Andrea Alciato published a collection of poetic texts to which he called Emblematum liber, creating a new literary type. In their original format, the emblems were made of a brief motto, a picture and a verse text, but this pattern was not mandatory. Alciato’s emblem book became a best seller and hundreds of authors imitated his model with variations. Many of those printed emblems reached an extraordinary popularity and came to influence artists or designers working in the decoration of ephemeral art, buildings, furniture and many other materials. Regarding their efficient capacity to express complex ideas in concise and impacting forms, easy to memorize, emblems settled a common symbolic language throughout Europe, and later in the New World, reaching a global impact in the Early Modern Period.
For the layperson, identifying emblems in artworks is not an easy task. With this project, we intend to leverage on the existing corpus of classified/described emblem images (e.g., from Iconclass.org and related websites - https://iconclass.org/help/aboutc) to create a mobile application that allows users to interactively describe an art work they are seeing in order to identify the underlying emblem.
Iconclass is a specialized library classification designed for art and iconography. It is based on a numerical system (notations) associated with textual descriptions. Several art databases use the Iconclass notation, including databases dedicated to emblems (such as http://emblematica.grainger.illinois.edu/ or https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/ .
As an example the, emblem on http://emblematica.grainger.illinois.edu/detail/emblem/E004095 (Figure 1), could be classified using Iconclass as:
25F33(EAGLE)(+21) - predatory birds: eagle (+ young animal)
25F33(EAGLE)(+422) - predatory birds: eagle (+ animal 'educating the young', playing with young)
25F33(EAGLE)(+5262) - predatory birds: eagle (+ flying animal(s))
46A122(...)1 - armorial bearing, heraldry (with NAME of family) - coat of arms
86(PATRE VIAM MONSTRANTE) - proverbs, sayings, etc. (PATRE VIAM MONSTRANTE)
24A6 - sun represented as face, wheel, etc.
Objetivo
The main objective of this project is to develop a mobile app and associated (server) backend services that helps users to determine what emblem is associated with an art work.
The application should provide this functionality in an interactive way through a chat-bot-like interaction style where users provide information and refine that information as the bot asks for more details.
The final, and ideal, result for such an interaction should be the presentation of a source emblem image (or a list of potential source images) and associated description to the user.
The application should allow users to interact through written text and/or speech.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
- Study emblems
- Study the Iconclass system and existing Iconclass-based databases particularly dedicated to emblems
- Study Chatbot systems
- Define the software architecture for the application and associated server (backend) system
- Write intermediate report
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
- Implement the proposed functionality
- Evaluate of the application with real users
- Write scientific paper about results
- Write report
Condições
Observações
O trabalho de estágio será assistido pela doutora Filipa Medeiros do CIEC - Centro Interuniversitário de Estudos Camonianos.
Orientador
Jorge Cardoso
jorgecardoso@dei.uc.pt 📩