Sprecher
Beschreibung
Cultural heritage metadata systems face fundamental challenges
representing experimental artworks that resist conventional classification. This research proposes a domain-specific ontology framework to address these challenges, using Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee (1982)—a seminal postcolonial feminist artists' books—as a critical case study.
Dictee is a hybrid work combining untranslated Korean, French, and English text with uncaptioned photographs, organized around nine Greek muses. As a postcolonial feminist intervention, it bypassed patriarchal art institutions through independent publishing while articulating diasporic Korean women's experiences under colonial and postcolonial conditions. Current library metadata (MARC) reduces this work to "fiction," while controlled vocabularies (LCSH, AAT) lack URIs for domain-specific concepts central to the work: "diasporic memory," "translational violence," "dictaphonic structure," and "anti-documentary desire."
The proposed framework develops a domain ontology for artists' books by strategically reusing and aligning existing ontologies:
- Schema.org for basic bibliographic structure
- Linked.art for visual arts context
- CIDOC CRM for cultural heritage semantics
- BIBFRAME for library interoperability
Our semantic alignment strategy implements language tags (@lang="ko", "en", "fr") for multilingual integrity, custom properties for unmappable concepts, and structured relationships connecting nine chapters to historical figures (Yu Gwan-sun, Joan of Arc), literary influences (Gertrude Stein, Marguerite Duras), and historical events (March First Movement, Japanese colonial period).
Preliminary implementation demonstrates how this approach addresses structural gaps in general-purpose vocabularies that systematically marginalize postcolonial feminist epistemologies. The resulting JSON-LD dataset structure enables automatic discovery across disciplines (literature, art history, Asian American studies) through SPARQL queries, while maintaining FAIR compliance and cross-institutional interoperability. This work-in-progress shows how domain ontology design can balance community-specific epistemological needs with broader semantic web standards, providing a replicable model for representing marginalized cultural objects in digital archives.
Keywords: Domain Ontologies, Linked Open Data, Semantic Alignment, Cultural Heritage, Artists' Books, Postcolonial Feminism
