Modeling the Visitatio Sepulchri: Some Problems of Representation

My problem, simply stated, is this: How can I represent a collection of cultural artifacts to enable scholarly analyses of them? For over 20 years I have wrestled with this question as I worked to capture on disk the medieval Visitatio Sepulchri, the most fruitful of the various forms now known as liturgical drama. Beginning with some home-made codes, a flat file, and some sorting routines, I built, demolished, and rebuilt the system again and again in a quest to faithfully represent the repertory I had chosen to study. What was originally an ASCII flat file became a relational database, with tables storing information about libraries and manuscripts along with tables recording the complete texts and rubrics of all known sources of the form. I had finished the design for the tables storing musical information and was about to begin data entry when I faced a crisis. The sheer magnitude of data entry that lay before me combined with my lack of academic status and my desire to move on to more interesting work induced me to abandon the project. Even the very nature of the project was becoming troublesome. While I had extended the utility of the database over the years, I had not overcome the fundamental problem that plagued the project from the start.

What was it that I was really studying? I wanted to study the texts and music of the medieval Visitatio Sepulchri. Instead, I found myself studying my own model of the reportory, a model that was both sparse and idiosyncratic. How could I get around this? Indeed, could I get around this? In this paper I will discuss some of the ontological and epistemological issues that have confounded my own attempts and those of other scholars to represent any such cultural artifacts by digital means. I will suggest that any attempt to capture a collection of artifacts must begin with an understanding the processes that scholars actually employ when investigating such artifacts. I will argue that any such attempt must begin with the artifacts themselves (or at least a faithful reproduction of the artifacts) while simultaneously remaining in ignorance of these artifacts. I will outline the structure of a three-layered "Ignorance Base" to facilitate such a study, a structure that clearly separates the artifacts being represented (or images of them in this case) from interpretations of these artifacts. I will suggest that such a structure, while not fully surmounting the issues that called it into being, provides a better grounding for the study of cultural artifacts, the medieval Visitatio Sepulchri in particular, than the modeling techiques typically employed.