EGITH - Engendering Data. Steps Towards an Ontology for the Representation of Gender in Cultural Heritage

The neologism en-gendering indicates the process of generation, production, and constitution of gender. From this point of view, gender is a semiotic device assumed by subjects in the formation of their own identity, adhering to the effects of meaning produced by the models and habitus of a given culture. Feminist scholars have long analysed the process in Art and Literature, but this knowledge is fragmented and not yet adequately supported by digital tools. In this paper we describe EGITH (En-gendering Identities Through History) an extension of GenderedCHContents, an ontology aligned with the Europeana Data Model (EDM), designed to capture concepts related to the construction of gender in the CH domain [2]. We further extend the ontology GenderedCHContents with fine-grained information, relative to the narrative and semiotic dimension of gender in CH. For the modelling of fictional characters we rely, on the one hand, on the semiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce and the Narrative Theory of Umberto Eco [3], while on the other, we rely on the tradition of feminist literary criticism. EGITH is populated with data concerning the main female characters in two well-known literary works of the Italian canon, Dante’s Divina Commedia and Boccaccio’s Decameron, and their literary critique.