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Research Question
FWF - Austrian Science Fund,
The FWF
https://www.fwf.ac.at/en
(2018-10-31).
-funded project about the mediality of diplomatic communication examines the exchange of information of Habsburg’s diplomats in Constantinople with the imperial court in Vienna. Written sources (letters, final and secret reports, as well as a long-lost travelogue) from the 17
th
century are the basis of the study. They provide a deep insight into problems of peacekeeping, intercultural and interreligious coexistence, consequential conflicts and strategies to solve them (Meienberger 1973; Droste 2006
). However, the information is not “objective”; discourse traditions, personal interests, the self-portrayal of the agents, as well as transmission conditions (postal routes, information security) are of importance. In summary: the media had a great impact on information and knowledge transfer between Habsburg’s diplomats and the Viennese Court. Moreover, the media determined what people learned and knew about the Ottoman Empire (Faulstich et al. 2007). Thus, the computer-aided analyses of the selected sources is conducted from a media-scientific viewpoint. The study will provide a better understanding of the constructed knowledge about Ottomans and the Islam in (Central) Europe, which has still an impact until today.
Digital Edition
The travelogue and the correspondence, as well as research results and analyzes, will be open access and publicly available as a digital edition
The digital edition will meet the evaluation criteria for digital scholary editions by the Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik (IDE) (Sahle, 2014), the Quality criteria for electronic source editions of the Porta Historica Porta Historica (2008) and the Minimum Standards for Electronic Editions of the Association for Documentary Editing (Hajo 2002).
. The edition will offer different perspectives
on the texts, which include not only the digital facsimiles and the transcriptions, but also semantic enrichments and visualizations to uncover the ways of knowledge transfer and discourse traditions. Additional historical background information provide the contextualization of the sources.
Digital methods create a transmedial representation of text. On transmediality of text, see: Sahle (2016), Sahle (2010).
The historical critical edition of the travel report and letters will be realized in TEI-P5
TEI, Text Encoding Initiative,
DTA-Basisformat (Deutsches Textarchiv, 2018) is a guideline for historical texts, recommended by CLARIN-D and the DFG
ODD stands for "One Document Does it all". It is a TEI XML-conformant specification format that allows customizing TEI P5.
and follow wherever possible the DTA-Basisformat
http://www.tei-c.org
(accessed 2018-10-31).
. A detailed encoding definition for research specific annotations will be documented in TEI ODD
.
. It includes major transcriptional observations (line breaks, damages, corrections), text structures (divisions, paragraphs, headings) and historical interpretation (persons, places, general terms, events, correspondence formulas or plagiarism). Especially the latter annotations get identifiers to interlink text passages within the sources. By merging the specific events, persons or places direct comparisons and analyses of the reports can be made.
The travelogue will also be described with the methods of the manuscript-description module of the TEI
TEI Modul Manuscript Description,
METS. Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard,
TEI element <correspDesc>, http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-correspDesc.html
SKOS. Simple Knowledge Organization System, https://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/ (accessed 2018-10-31). e.g. GND. Gemeinsame Normdatei,
. Besides, the digital resources are described in METS
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html
(accessed 2018-10-31).
for the representation in book viewers and system-internal in Dublin Core
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets
(accessed 2018-10-31).
. The data model of the letters also include the TEI extension “correspondence description”
DC. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative,
http://dublincore.org
(accessed 2018-10-31).
to enable data exchange with the web service CorrespSearch
.
correspSearch. Search scholarly editions of letters, https://correspsearch.net (accessed 2018-10-31), see: Dumont (2016).
Semantic Web technologies are used for data enrichment: SKOS
representations of concepts for indexing and to integrate the data in the Linked Open Data context, the project will make use of public identifiers from international authority files
http://www.dnb.de/DE/Standardisierung/GND/gnd_node.html
(accessed 2018-10-31), VIAF. Virtual International Authority File,
http://viaf.org
(accessed 2018-10-31), GeoNames,
https://www.geonames.org
(accessed 2018-10-31), Deutsche Biographie,
www.deutsche-biographie.de
(accessed 2018-10-31).
.
Based on the encoding, content analyzes for a comparison of the content in the two media types and visualizations will be realized. This will include for example space-time visualization of the named locations from the itinerary or the scenes of the events described, evaluations of categorized passages to reveal dominant topics, or network analyses to identify main actors and their relationships to each other.
Part of the data will be experimentally processed with natural language processing (NLP) tools. For example, Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify spatial information or persons, n-grams and part-of-speech tagging for analyses of the use of words and word frequencies. The outcomes should help to uncover plagiarism or help answer the question of how information is conveyed and what opinions (positive, negative or neutral) have been expressed about an entity, in particular in connection with the characterization and description of persons or the self-presentation of the writers. It is experimental because applying natural language processing (NLP) methods and tools to historical texts is problematic, especially because of a lack of standardized orthography (Piotrowski 2012).
Digital Repository
OAIS. Open Archival Information System, http://www.oais.info (accessed 2018-10-31). FEDORA. Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture, https://duraspace.org/fedora (accessed 2018-10-31).
The described analysis, processing and presentation as well as the archiving will take place via an in-house digital research data repository GAMS
GAMS - Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management System,
https://gams.uni-graz.at
(accessed 2019-04-26).
(Stigler, Steiner 2018). It is an OAIS
-compliant Asset Management System for the management, publication and long-term archiving of digital resources from all disciplines of the humanities. The infrastructure is based on the open source software project FEDORA
and is continuously further developed since 2003. T
he citability of all data objects in the system is guaranteed with persistent identifiers based on the Handle System
Handle System,
https://www.handle.net/
(accessed 2018-10-31).
and the reusability as well as the compatibility of the research data, the data models and the transformation scripts by the use of data standards (TEI, DC, RDF, SKOS, METS).