A digital humanities project exploring the beauty, rituals, and philosophy of the Japanese tea ceremony through Linked Open Data.
aLODofTEA is a semantic web project that explores the Japanese tea ceremony (Sadō) as a cultural practice, combining text encoding (TEI/XML) and Linked Open Data (LOD) technologies.
Through this project, we:
- Created a TEI-compliant digital edition of chapters from The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō
- Identified and linked cultural heritage objects related to our domain
- Modeled the information in RDF using real museum metadata
- Visualized the data in a website
All work was conducted with special attention to aesthetics and cultural respect, reflecting the spirit of wabi-sabi and the harmony found in tea rituals 🍃
Developed as part of the course Information Science and Cultural Heritage (2024/2025), taught by Prof. Francesca Tomasi and Prof. Marilena D’Aquino in the Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge (DHDK) master's program at the University of Bologna.
- 🗻 Cultural Focus: Embracing Zen, Wabi-Sabi and symbolism of the tea ceremony
- 🧾 Textual Encoding: TEI/XML edition with semantic markup of places and concepts
- 🏺 Cultural Objects: 10 cultural heritage items from real museum collections
- 🕸️ LOD Integration: RDF modeling, Theoretical and Conceptual models
- 🌐 Web Presentation: A thematic website showcasing our research
This project is shared under the MIT License.
Please cite appropriately and respect cultural context when reusing content.
Thank you for joining us in this quiet, mindful journey through heritage, poetry and philosophy — all contained in a cup of tea 🍵.