Visual Knowledge: Textual Iconography of the Quixote, a Hypertextual Archive

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. 1
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.2 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.3 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.4 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.5
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 <http:/
/www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes> ) for the purpose
of allowing quick browsing and searching of the growing
collection. 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.6
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).
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 ( <http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/c
ervantes> ).
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).
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.
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. <http://webdb
.ucs.ed.ac.uk/ malts/other/VKC/dsp-all-pape
rs.cfm> .
6. We provide a more complete acknowledgement of the many
participants in this project at <http://www.csdl.tamu.e
du/cervantes/V2/CPI/images/iconography-acks
.html>
Bibliography
Catálogo de la exposición celebrada en la Biblioteca Nacional
en el tercer centenario de la publicación del Quijote. Madrid:
Biblioteca Nacional, 1905.
Cervantes Project. <http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/c
ervantes>
csdl.tamu.edu. Accessed June 6, 2002 3:08:05 PM. <http:
//www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes/V2/CPI/imag
es/iconography-acks.html>
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.
Exposición cervantina en la Biblioteca Nacional para
conmemorar el CCCXXX aniversario de la muerte de Miguel
de Cervantes Saavedra. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, 1946.
Hartau, Johannes. Don Quijote in der Kunst: Wandlungen
einer Symbolfigur. Berlin: Mann, 1987.
Lenaghan, Patrick, Javier Blas, and José Manuel Matilla.
Imágenes del Quijote: Modelos de representación en las
ediciones de los siglos XVII a XIX. Madrid: Calcografía
Nacional, 2003. Mas, Juan Givanel. Catálogo de la exposición de Iconografía
cervantina. Barcelona: Biblioteca Central, 1944.
Monroy, Carlos, et al. "Texts, Images, Knowledge: Visualizing
Cervantes and Picasso." Proceedings of the Visual Knowledges
Conference. Ed. John Frow. University of Edinburgh Institute
for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2003. Accessed 2003.
<http://webdb.ucs.ed.ac.uk/malts/other/VK
C/dsp-all-papers.cfm>
Paulson, Ronald. Don Quixote in England: the Aesthetics of
Laughter. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.
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.
Schmidt, Rachel. Critical Images: The Canonization of Don
Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century.
Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1999.