Together with Bernhard Oberreither (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and Laura Untner (Freie Universität Berlin), I presented the paper „Semantic Modelling of Intermedial and Intertextual References in Comics: A Case Study on Max Baitinger’s Sibylla (2021)“ at the annual conference of the Digital Humanities Association for the German-speaking countries (DHd) at the University of Vienna (23–27 February 2026). The motto “Not only text, not only data” called for widening digital humanities beyond text-centred projects and for preserving the methods and code behind research data, not only the data itself.

Our paper brought comics studies and digital humanities together to ask whether semantic modelling can represent the complex intertextual and intermedial references of comics. Its case study was Max Baitinger’s Sibylla (2021), a comic made for the 400th birthday of the baroque poet Sibylla Schwarz (1621–1638). My part was to show how the comic traces Schwarz’s reception across the centuries and questions its own way of narrating history. In particular, its references to Sappho echo a long reception history that has exaggerated Schwarz’s affinity with the ancient Greek poet, a lineage the comic both stages and critiques. Bernhard Oberreither and Laura Untner then modelled these references in RDF using the INTRO ontology. They addressed the challenges of granularity, specificity and computability and presented three test models of a single panel.