While looking at an artwork, the viewer tries to understand it by looking at its parts and connecting them until an overall interpretation is reached. In this process, the viewer relates what he/she sees to his background knowledge in order to decode the artwork’s signs and subject matter. In fact, he/she is making sense of it by creating a narrative interpretation, grounded in the artwork features and interlinked with external knowledge.
My research interest focuses on the semantic representation of this narrative interpretation, and how this understanding is revealed by a text, which is the main means of communication of art historians’ interpretations and scholarly discourse. By formally representing the network of the art interpretation, it would be possible to retrieve knowledge already available online and to develop tools to dynamically discover more information useful to help viewers go further in their interpretation.
