Wir sind mit einem Poster bei der TEI 2022, der Konferenz der Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) an der Newcastle University, am 12.-16.09.2022 vertreten und stellen unser Projekt vor. Kommen Sie uns am Posterstand besuchen, wir beantworten gerne alle Fragen.

Building a digital infrastructure for the edition and analysis of historical travelogues.

Sandra Balck* (balck@ios-regensburg.de), Anna Ananieva (ananieva@ios-regensburg.de), Hermann Beyer-Thoma (hermann@beyer-thoma.de), Ingo Frank (frank@ios-regensburg.de), Jacob Möhrke (moehrke@ios-regensburg.de), Corwin Schnell (schnell@ios-regensburg.de), Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) Regensburg, Germany

Abstract

Editions of historical travelogues are often based on document modelling with TEI. These editions lack the expressiveness and flexibility to answer complex research questions regarding travel (sub-)events (departure, arrival, etc.) and travel observations (visited public places, habits of people, etc.). To enable the analysis and visualisation of the material, our project is working on a digital edition combining TEI with semantic web and linked data technologies.

We will use an annotated critical text edition of the unpublished records of Franz Xaver Bronner’s (1758 – 1850) journey from Aarau, via St. Petersburg, to the university in Kazan (1810) and his way back (1817) via Moscow, Lviv and Vienna as a case study. The aim will be to develop a modularly expandable digital research infrastructure, which will support digital transcription, annotation and visualisation of travelogues. 

In the preliminary stages of the project, the first part (the outward journey) of Franz Xaver Bronner’s travelogue manuscript has been transcribed with Transkribus. Training modules were developed based on manually transcribed texts, these are to be used for the semi-automatic transcription of other related texts. People, places, travel and other events were annotated with XML markup elements using TEI. In the next step, ontology design patterns for travelogues and itineraries will be developed. This includes a new annotation scheme for linking the TEI annotated text passages to associated database entries. The edition will enable the visualisations of textual information and contextual data.

Our approach makes a more explicit data modelling possible and enables for further analysis and visualisation it goes beyond existing projects, such as the Hellespont project (Mambrini 2016) or the Semantic Blumenbach edition (Wettlaufer 2015) due to the development and application of ontology design patterns.

Works Cited

Mambrini, Francesco (2016). “Treebanking in the world of Thucydides. Linguistic annotation for the Hellespont Project”. In: Digital Humanities Quarterly  10 (2). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/2/000251/000251.html

Wettlaufer, Jörg et al. (2015). “Semantic Blumenbach: Exploration of Text–Object Relationships with Semantic Web Technology in the History of Science”. In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30 (1), pp. i187–i198. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv047 

Beitrag ist veröffentlicht im „TEI2022 Conference Book“:

Balck, Sandra et al. (2022). “Building a Digital Infrastructure for the Edition and Analysis of Historical Travelogues”. In: TEI 2022 Conference Book (12 – 16 September 2022, Newcastle University), ed. by James Cummings. Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2022, p. 70-71, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7071025