Digitizing the Past: Prague Talk on Digital Humanites

A team of researchers at the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of
Sciences and Humanities and the University of Graz are developing a digital
scholarly edition of the records documenting the Imperial Diet (Reichstag) of
Regensburg in 1576. At the Imperial Diet, between June and October 1576,
Emperor Maximilian II and more than 200 representatives of the imperial estates
(Reichsstände) of the Holy Roman Empire discussed and decided about the
political fate of Central Europe. The numerous meetings and deliberations at the
Imperial Diet are of central interest to the ongoing project and new digital
edition.

From a digital scholarly editing point of view, the project explores a particular
way of editing historical documents (seen as a text characterised by its content)
and representing the formal information, for instance about the above-mentioned
deliberations, as structured data in RDF. This kind of editing is a further
development of editing practices used by historians–in a recent article Georg
Vogeler suggested the name “assertive edition”.

Our presentation will explore this editing approach in context of the Imperial Diet
́s records edition. We will discuss how we have edited the historical records and
semantically enriched them with TEI markup, how we extract “facts” in form of
RDF triples, and how we combine the edited texts with a database. This approach
allows us to access the Imperial Diet of 1576 as a bundle of communication
events and thereby opens it up for historiographical research interested in
content, communication and procedures.

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