Mag. Dr. Isabella Nicka
Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture
Körnermarkt 13, 3500 Krems
Tel.: +43 662 8044 4990
E-Mail:
Office Hours
By appointment via email.
Research Interests
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Digital art history (including graph databases and semantic web technologies)
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Depicted objects in visual media of the late Middle Ages
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Visual narrative strategies
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Representations of material in historical visual media
Biography
Isabella Nicka studied Art History in Vienna. Through her project-based work at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna, she gained experience in the field of museum databases. Since completing her studies in 2007 with a diploma thesis on Gottfried Semper’s theory of the applied arts, she has been working as a Research Associate at the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (IMAREAL) in Krems, which has been part of the University of Salzburg since 2012. In 2017, she completed her PhD on Möbeln in den visuellen Medien des Mittelalters , demonstrating how this category of objects functions as a medium-specific means of communication to convey emotions and abstract ideas, to characterize figures and actions, and to make temporal sequences understandable in medieval pictorial narratives. At IMAREAL, she is responsible for the further development and curation of REALonline, a graph database that explores and makes accessible the semantic networks of visual media from the 12th to the 16th centuries. From 2019 to 2021, Isabella Nicka led the IMAREAL sub-project of ONAMA – Ontology of Narratives of the Middle Ages, which analyzes medieval narratives in text and image using semantic web technologies. Her current project, thingTAG-Mittelalter, focuses on objects in medieval art and culture, combining a gamification app with a citizen science approach. She also contributes her expertise in digital art history and in the functionalization of depicted objects in medieval visual media to her teaching at the Department of Art History.
Publications
Prozessierte Objekte? Möbel in den Erzählstrategien visueller Medien des Mittelalters ( formate – Forschungen zur Materiellen Kultur 3), Vienna [forthcoming 2022].
“Needful Things. Die Relationen der Dinge in einer Ontologie mittelalterlicher Narrative.” In: MEMO 8: Erzählende Dinge. Funktionen der Objekte in Narrativen in Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit (with Katharina Zeppezauer, Miriam Landkammer, Peter Hinkelmanns, Manuel Schwembacher). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25536/20210805.
“Object Links in/zu Bildern mit REALonline analysieren.” In: Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (ed.), Object Links – Dinge in Beziehung (formate – Forschungen zur Materiellen Kultur 1), Vienna 2019, pp. 95–126.
“Daten neu verknoten. Die Verwendung einer Graphdatenbank für die Bilddatenbank REALonline.” In: DARIAH-DE Working Papers no. 31, ed. by Mirjam Blümm, Thomas Kollatz, Stefan Schmunk, and Christof Schöch; co-edited by Andreas Kuczera. Göttingen: DARIAH-DE, 2019, pp. 1–36. URL: http://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:gbv:7-dariah-2019-3-5 (with Ingrid Matschinegg, Clemens Hafner, Martin Stettner, Stefan Zedlacher).
“Interfaces. Berührungszonen von Transzendenz und Immanenz im spätmittelalterlichen Sakralraum.” In: Marion Meyer, Deborah Klimburg-Salter (eds.), Visualisierungen von Kult, Vienna–Cologne–Weimar 2014, pp. 260–293, figs. on pp. 438–444. URL: https://doi.org/10.7767/boehlau.9783205793052.260.
