The Content of Accounts and Registers in their Digital Edition

This article considers the use of semantic web technologies in the context of everyday historians. It deduces from theoretical considerations needs for the actual implementation of a digital edition. It explains some of the basic concepts of the semantic web more extensively than necessary for the digital humanities scholar already familiar with these technologies. I’ve argued elsewhere why a digital edition can be considered the best method to publish economic records as historical sources. It discusses first discusses the drawbacks of reducing digital edition of accounts and economic records to the encoding offered by the TEI. I will compare the text oriented approach of the TEI with other digital representations of accounts that are oriented primarily on the economic facts accounted. The second part of the article discusses the opportunities offered by the usage of semantic web technologies (RDF, RDFs/OWL, SKOS and SPARQL) to encode and expose the content layer of digital editions. I have described elsewhere in more detail my own proposal how a customized XML/TEI transcription can be transformed into a XML serialisation of RDF facts, and there are other projects interlacing RDF structures into TEI. This article focus on an introduction into the semantic web technologies as proposed by the W3C and discusses how they can be applied to historical accounts as a common data model, for the creation of controlled vocabularies, in exposing the content layer over the web, and for querying data aggregated from several sources. The final part of the article exemplifies the whole set of methods on data extracted from existing digital editions of late medieval accounts. The presented in this paper is part the MEDEA activities funded by DFG and NEH

[Einleitung] Der Computer und die Handschriften. Zwischen digitaler Reproduktion und maschinengestützter Forschung

Die Beiträge dieses Bandes zeigen, dass sich die Diskussion über den Computer als Medium für die Verbreitung von Grundlagen und Ergebnissen der Forschung nicht losgelöst von einer Diskussion über den Computer als Forschungsinstrument führen lässt. Die digitale Reproduktion von Handschriften determiniert die Art und Weise ihrer Erforschung. Einerseits verändern sich Verarbeitung und Beschreibung eines handschriftlichen Zeugnisses; andererseits schließt sich an seine digitale Repräsentation die Forschungsdiskussion im Medium des Internets unmittelbar an. Die Einleitung versucht aus diesem Sachverhalt Schlussfolgerungen auf mögliche Zukunftsszenarien einer »digitalen Kodikologie« und einer »digitalen Paläographie« abzuleiten

Charters Encoding Initiative Overview

The Charters Encoding Initiative considers the possibilities of a standard to encode medieval and early modern charters with XML. It represents a working group to notify our intention to work continuously together, to spread our proposals in the scientific community and to integrate them into existing standards especially the guidelines of the TEI. See also http://www.cei.lmu.de/

Versioning Charters: On the Multiple Identities of Historical Legal Documents and their Digital Representation

This chapter proposes a model for the concept of versions and how it can be applied in the scholarly discipline of diplomatics, the study of historical legal documents. It describes the various concepts and physical things the discipline of diplomatics connects with the term charter, as well as the practice of people working with them. The chapter also connects the history of preparing, engrossing and copying charters, with the archival and scholarly practices of describing, editing, or photographing, including transforming charters into digital representations. By drawing on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographical Records (FRBR), the Vocabulaire Internationale de la Diplomatique, and charter databases such as monasterium.net and The Making of Charlemagne’s Europe, the author argues that a model for versions of charters should not start with a definition of charter, but rather with the network of relationships which can be considered instantiations of versioning. W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) representations of the data fragments used to represent a charter—for example images, descriptions, texts, legal actions, archival and other identifiers—allow a giant graph of charter versions to be created and help to use and approach the rich set of charter databases as integrated resource

“Standing-off Trees and Graphs”: On the Affordance of Technologies for the Assertive Edition

Starting from the observation that the existing models of digital scholarly editions can be expressed in many technologies, this paper goes beyond the simple opposition of ‘XML’ and ‘graph’, It studies the implicit context of the technologies as applied to digital scholarly editions: embedded mark-up in XML/TEI trees, graph representa- tions in RDF, and stand-off annotation as realised in annotation tools widely used for information extraction. It describes the affordances of the encoding methods offered. It takes as a test case the “assertive edition” (Vogeler 2019), in which the text is considered in a double role: as palaeographical and linguistic phenomenon, and as a representation of information. It comes to the conclusion that the affordances of XML help to detect sequential and hierarchical properties of a text, while those of RDF best cover the representation of knowledge as semantic networks of statements. The relationship between them can be expressed by the metaphor of ‘layers’, for which stand-off annotation technologies seem to be best fitted. However, there is no standardised technical formalism to create stand-off annotations beyond graphical tools sharing interface elements. The contribution concludes with the call for the acceptance of the advantages of each technology, and for efforts to be made to discuss the best way to combine these technologies

Rechtstitel und Herrschaftssymbol

This study investigates for the first time in detail the specific context for the use of documents prepared for recipients in Italy by the Staufer Frederick II (1198–1250). It compares the texts used for typical writings in communal Italy with the bureaucratic Regnum Siciliae, thereby addressing the issue of the function of written documents with a focus on the symbolic communication of authority