Wiennerisches Diarium Digital: Involving users in scholarly annotation (paper)
Dario Kampkaspar* Dario Kampkaspar is currently working as a web frontend developer at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities in Vienna, Austria, and as is involved in several DH projects at the Duke Augustus Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. A historian and historical linguist, he has been involved in scholarly editing as well as teaching history with a focus on digital scholarly editions and DH in general since 2010. He is also part of the international DLiNA group researching networks in dramatic texts., Daniel Schopper* Daniel Schopper is coordinating the ACDH’s working group on Data, Resources and Standards. His fields of interests include data modelling and conversion techniques, text representation and encoding, methodological challenges in a digital environment and text-related software development. At the ACDH he is responsible for the creation and curation of standards-based digital resources like dictionaries or digital editions, covering the full cycle of scholarly data production. He is enthusiastic about innovative systems that help scholars to reflect, exploit and extend the possibilities of the digital paradigm in the arts and humanities., and Claudia Resch* Claudia Resch is a senior researcher and project leader at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Current research focuses on German texts of the early modern period and the application of literary and linguistic computing in a corpus-based approach to textual issues. Key areas covered are historical linguistics, text stylistics, and annotation problems associated with non-standard varieties of Early Modern German. Since 2012 Claudia Resch is a lecturer at the Department for German Philology of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where she teaches on the topic of digital approaches to textual sources.
1Since its foundation in 1703, the newspaper Wien[n]erisches Diarium has been collected continually and is fully available as a body of sources. Facilitating its use in a digital environment is of great scholarly interest to a number of disciplines within the humanities. For this reason the projects’ aim is to edit and annotate a corpus of 500 selected issues from different decades of the eighteenth century within 2 years. Based on facsimiles provided by the Austrian National Library’s digitization program ANNO, the project team will develop a workflow in order to edit the newspaper using the TEI Guidelines.
2A call for nominations, which was promoted via digital channels, invited scholars of various disciplines to nominate specific issues for the shortlist. The review of the nominations received has shown that a broad spectrum of topics is represented in the selected issues. A number of additions which the project team ended up making were therefore not so much due to a necessity to complete the thematic range, but aimed at closing up larger temporal gaps. In order to be able to accurately and thoroughly document the Wien[n]erisches Diarium in a continuous, chronological manner, the project team ultimately decided to include five representative issues from each year.
3The aim is not only to provide the full texts of those selected 500 numbers to the researching public but also and especially to provide a means for interested scholars to add their own annotations without having to go into too much detail in learning TEI. We think that this is an important intermediary step in introducing “digital novices” o working with and on digital editions. In a university environment, this step can be used to introduce students to the intricacies of annotating by first introducing them to the level of abstraction necessary and only later focusing on the technical details and possibly manual tagging.
4As the project is aimed not only at historians, but all flavours of the humanities, we have come to the conclusion that the exact details of what will be annotated can’t be predicted. Certainly, people and places will play a major role and the development of the frontend will include ways to easily mark words or sections as such and select the corresponding index entry from a list. This, though, will most likely be the easy part as we can use existing authority files – German Norm Data file GND, VIAF –, websites – Vienna History Wiki – and data models. When it come to more specific needs the different disciplines may have, things start to get complicated. Hence, special workshops will be held with scientists to discuss their needs and expectations. From this, models for describing the data and mappings to e.g., CIDOC CRM will have to be created. In addition to these modelled annotations, full text annotation are expected to play a major role with contributors adding additional information to parts of the texts.
5From the nomination process we know that there is a community interested in the sources and interested in contributing to annotating them. The project team cannot, however, predict how many people will work with the sources in the middle or long term nor can we provide any substantial control over the annotations given. It is, thus, necessary to establish mechanisms by which scholars can control what has been annotated. One way to achieve both input and control might be “Annotateathons” where scholars and the project team meet to annotate, control existing annotations and discuss further needs.
6In order to facilitate the idea of focusing on learning the necessary abstraction rather than on the technical details of XML and to enable wide parts of the community to contribute to the edition, all annotations will be made in a web front end. From here, people and places will directly be written into the XML-file while free annotations will be stored separately. This front end will be evaluated in the context of the workshops mentioned so as to provide an easy point of entry for those who have never participated in a digital edition.
7The project headquarters are located at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (AAS); the creation of the full text versions and the enrichment of the data is carried out in cooperation with the Institute for History of Art and Musicology and the University of Innsbruck’s work group for Digitization and Digital Preservation.
Bibliography
- ANNO – AustriaN Newspapers Online. http://anno.onb.ac.at/