The Digital Humanities project ONAMA – Ontology of Narratives of the Middle Ages –, funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is based on the extensive corpora of two long-term projects, the image database REALonline and the text database MHDBDB, which systematically index images and texts of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. In ONAMA, not only constants and variables of narrative structures become evident, but also the individual points of reference that make up a specific narrative. As this research shows, things are as essential for narratological structures as characters and actions. The article focuses on how things are represented in the ONAMA-model and how their analysis can deepen our understanding of the narratives of images and texts in the Middle Ages.

What different functions do things play involved in narrative strategies and what approaches can be used? These and more questions form the starting point for the current issue. They are the result of the ONAMA – Ontology of Medieval Narratives project, a collaboration between Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank and the REALonline image database at the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, both affiliated to the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Middle Ages and Early Modern Studies at the University of Salzburg.

In: DHd 2020 Spielräume: Digital Humanities zwischen Modellierung und Interpretation. Konferenzabstracts. Abstracts zur 7. Tagung des Verbands Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V. in Paderborn; edited by Christof Schöch, p. 131-135: 10.5281/zenodo.3666690 Abstract: Anyone who has read J.R.R. Tolkien's tale of Bilbo Baggins' encounter with the fire dragon Smaug, who guards a gigantic treasure deep in the Lonely Mountain, or seen it opulently staged on the big screen, has most likely had the feeling that he or she has encountered a similar story at some point. And rightly so, since the encounter of a hero with a dangerous dragon, which often boils down to a fight to the death, is a widespread, long-established narrative that also enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages and was accordingly frequently brought up. Thus Siegfried, Beowulf, Tristan, George and Lancelot - to name but a few - successfully confront dangerous dragons. In addition to Beowulf, there are explicit connections to Siegfried in particular: Siegfried, who is also present in a variety of texts outside the Nibelungenlied, kills the dragon Fáfnir in the Völsunga Saga - here bearing the name Sigurd - who is hiding in a cave in the wilderness in order to gain possession of the dragon's hoard. Richard Wagner took up this episode in his Ring of the Nibelung; J.R.R. Tolkien drew inspiration from it for The Hobbit or There and Back Again. In order not to rely on random discoveries of similar narratives, but to enable a systematic comparison of the structures and building blocks of narrative in literature and images of the Middle Ages, the project ONAMA - Ontology of the Narratives of the Middle Ages - was launched.