The Historical Framing Problem: Temporal Modeling of Interactions between Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage

The distinction between tangible and intangible cultural heritage (CH) is problematic for modeling interactions between material and immaterial expressions of the arts and culture. This hinders capturing changes in CH objects in their cultural contexts necessary to understand their social functions and symbolic meanings. This paper addresses this problem twofold. First, after providing a theoretical-historiographical overview of the concepts of framing and historical time, the present paper proposes a historical frames system consisting of reference frames and historical frames. A model of historical frames allowing for spatiotemporal views of storylines is discussed in more detail. Second, a framework of ontological modules is provided that expresses the historical frames by extending existing ontologies. As most interactions between tangible and intangible CH are less defined, particular attention is paid to the modeling of ephemeral events. The model is designed using five types of such interactions in a case study of the late 12th century reliquary shrine of St. Servatius in Maastricht and festivities around it. The outcomes are four modules describing 1) functions of objects in context 2) frames capturing different temporal events, in particular ephemeral events, 3) the evolution of material and immaterial objects, and 4) peculiarities of ephemeral events and objects.