Volume 24, Issue 1

The article presents the concept of a digital edition of late-medieval mystical mosaic treatises. These widespread publication, which are usually labelled as ‘pseudo-Eckhart’, are characterised by an almost unfathomable fluctuation between the manuscripts. Until today, this variance has prevented the publication of any traditional book editions and complicated any critical evaluation. The intended edition focusses on Pfeiffer ’s treatise XI/2 (‘Von der übervart der gotheit 2’) as a test case. It will provide access to divergent versions of this treatise and enable modern readers to compare them on different textual levels.

The last few years have seen an explosion of medieval images in digital form, chiefly as a result of photo-library and manuscript digitisation projects. An entire corpus of images, even selected solely by scene or iconography, becomes an unwieldy object of study by traditional art-historical means. This is even more the case for medieval images, where authorship and dating are often cloudy and unclear, and the image itself is in many cases the first resource for scholarly inquiry.We take the digital image – in particular, the digital image of the body – as our object of study in a wide-ranging computationally-augmented reading of an image-corpus; ours is made up of thousands of depictions of the ‘Annunciation’ and ‘Baptism’, selected not only for their primacy in Christian art but for their dialogical interaction. Our corpus of 6,564 ‘Annunciations’ and 883 ‘Baptisms’, whilst not necessarily representative in density, includes a wide range of stylistic, theological and historical tendencies.We computationally extract not only body images but poses, gestures and interactions. Such a range of gestures allows for a morphological treatment of bodily motifs, whose multi-dimensional, quantitative nature allows us to complicate and problematise iconographic taxonomies, populating the spaces between categories. Finally, our gestural manifolds provide a morphological pointer to dissecting the microtemporalities of the scenes, and their relative dynamics and inconsistencies.

This article discusses the question of how complex the narrations of Arthurian romances are by comparing them to the ‘simple form’ of fairy tales. In order to achieve this, we identify properties of the European folktale, which we then compare with an Arthurian text corpus consisting of Hartmann von Aue’s ‘Erec’ and ‘Iwein’ as well as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s ‘Parzival’. The typological investigation is carried out using data-driven methods, primarily Social Network Analysis , and focuses on various aspects of characters. By doing this, we gain an in-depth understanding of the relationships between Arthurian romances and fairy tales and of the differences within the genre of the Arthurian romance itself. We show that the results of statistical analysis refuse clear interpretation, thus providing new insights into the well-known objects.

Short epics in Middle High German are a challenge for author attribution procedures as they involve dealing with short texts, incomplete normalisation, and generic tests. Firstly, the paper discusses optimisation methods using basic form and grammar tags extracted from the ‘Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank’ (Middle High German Conceptual Database). As part of this, an evaluation test with normalised Middle High German texts is carried out where 20 texts with known authorship are used as ‘guessing texts’ and a further 19 works of the same authors as ‘comparison texts’. The use of grammar tags or basic forms, instead of inflected word forms leads to a deterioration of the recognition rate and the combination of basic forms or grammar tags with word forms leads to a slight improvement. Secondly, the authorship of the ‘Halbe Birne’ will be investigated with eight texts by Konrad von Würzburg, as well as a comparative corpus of 14 tales (German ‘Mären’) and seven novels. This leads to a direct calculation of which words can be specifically ascribed to Konrad von Würzburg. This method is first evaluated by determining the distinctive words on four Konrad texts; a control test on four other Konrad texts shows that a preferred use of the distinctive words leads to a significant increase in the recognition rate. Then, a Konrad-specific vocabulary is determined on the basis of eight Konrad texts. Using these distinctive words it can finally be shown that Konrad can be attributed with some certainty as the author of the ‘Halbe Birne’.

For some time, the use of GIS in the context of medieval studies has been increasing. Aside from providing opportunities to visualise historical data in an uncomplicated way, GIS offers numerous tools such as viewshed, kernel density estimation or georeferencing, allowing new insights into historical contexts, which at the same time can reveal new avenues for research. This paper illustrates both the potential and difficulties of working with GIS on the analysis of spatial structures in early medieval Eastern Saxony and Thuringia. The main outcomes are a very high settlement density in the entire investigation area, with special concentrations in the eastern Harz foreland, the Hassegau, as well as a rapid and early expansion of the Harz Mountains.

This paper sheds light on the possibilities and perspectives of linking digital editions of Medieval German texts to each other and to other digital resources. Furthermore, it discusses some of the internal and technical conditions necessary to render this linkage meaningful, like lemmatisation, part-of-speech-tagging, and using standardised mark-up languages. Finally, the sustainability and reusability of digital editions are considered. While in the past, editions of medieval texts were conceived as rather isolated scholarly works of individual editors, nowadays the collaboration and cooperation of greater working groups is essential in editing projects. Due to the complexity of editions consisting of multiple textual layers, e. g. apparatus entries, annotations, or facsimiles, the requirements for future digital editions have risen. The first approach to respond to these demands is to link the various textual layers to each other, enabling the users to navigate between these layers in a sensible way. The second step is to link the edited text to other resources, such as online dictionaries or other editions, allowing complex research networks to be created. These goals are achieved by lemmatising and other tagging methods, ensuring the information being mapped to a normalised and idealised frame of reference. Common standards like Unicode or the TEI guidelines are of great importance for such purposes, as they assure the interchange and re-use of scientific data, as well as their sustainability.

The inclusion of Semantic Web technologies into the lexicographic ‘Middle High German Conceptual Database’ (MHDBDB) is a challenge for this long-term project. Since the 1970 s the Middle High German Concept Database has aimed to provide an onomasiological dictionary for Middle High German. The latest technological revision dates back to 1992, so there is a growing demand for more contemporary infrastructure and usability. The data models themselves, as well as the linking of data sets with authority files, need to be modernised to ensure compatibility with the Semantic Web . This paper summarises the current discussion on formats and ontologies for online dictionaries with a focus on Middle High German lexicography.

The digital teaching of medieval, and especially auxiliary, scientific skills has been going on for more than a decade. Nevertheless, the breadth and depth of the auxiliary sciences is making them difficult to present in their entirety. With ‘Ad fontes’, basic knowledge of skills needed to study the Middle Ages is imparted through interactive exercises. The e-learning platform was completely revised in 2018, allowing new technical possibilities to be realised while maintaining the strengths of its intuitive exercises. Additionally, crowdsourcing enterprises prove extremely valuable in the application of knowledge. After all, it is only possible to bring together knowledge of a particular field if collaborations are established across individual institutions and researchers.

In the digital historical sciences, research datasets are generally highly connected. Using the example of the digital ‘Regesta Imperii’, this article will show how these networked structures can be modelled and analysed with the help of graph databases. In order to achieve relevant results with these new research perspectives, it is essential to closely dovetail scientific research perspectives and digital methodology. Graph modelling is especially helpful here, allowing to clearly map the structures of the technical problem in the graph in a way, understandable by the computer scientist. This serves as a solid basis for fruitful cooperation between digital humanities and medieval studies.

Working with Old High German and Old Saxon texts has become rare in German language and literature studies. Nowadays, the brief introductions to historical linguistics and philology do not suffice to enable students to explore the oldest German texts in significant depth. A new tool could at least help move closer to this dept of textual exploration: an on-line publication of all Old High German and Old Saxon texts with a morphological word-by-word annotation. The data has been collected by the research project ‘Old German Reference Corpus’ (‘Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch’ / ReA) and can already be used for complex database queries. Within the framework of the ‘eHumanities Centre for Historical Lexicography’ (eHumanities-Zentrum für Historische Lexikographie / ZHistLex), it has been converted into a clearly arranged format, focusing on the information needed for comprehending the texts: the ‘Lesekorpus Altdeutsch’ (LeA). This tool can of course not replace the work with text editions, translations and commentaries, but will help pave the way from the first insight into the language to a profound understanding. Additionally, a supplemental both-way linking between every word token and the corresponding entry in the on-line dictionaries of historical German is being prepared.

Using the example of the Herzog August Bibliothek, the paper shows how (medieval) manuscripts are currently catalogued in the digital environment and how the data is published and shared with other relevant communities. The paper focuses both on the process of data production as well as the exchange and re-use of data. In particular, the paper will discuss the challenges of distributing the data into non-specialised databases. Two elements are crucial here: firstly, the standardised modelling of manuscript-related information, including semantic enrichment. Secondly, the challenge of providing as much data as possible on the Web and offering interfaces to access the data.

The Digital Humanities project ‘ CANTUS NETWORK . Libri ordinarii of the Salzburg metropolitan province’ undertakes research around the liturgy and music of the churches and monasteries of the medieval ecclesiastical province of Salzburg. Key sources are the liturgical ‘prompt books’, called libri ordinarii , which include a short form of more or less the entire rite of a diocese or a monastery. The workflow of the project is set in an environment called GAMS, a humanities research data repository built for long-term storage and presentation of data coming from the humanities. Digital editions of the libri ordinarii of the province were generated with the aim of enabling a comparative analysis of the various different traditions. As a first step, the books were transcribed with strict rule-based tags in Microsoft Word and transformed to TEI using the community’s XSLT stylesheets and a Java-based script. Subsequently, Semantic Web technologies were deployed to foster graph-based search and analysis of the structured data. Possible future work on the topic is facilitated by the dissemination of content levels as Linked Open Data. Further analysis is conducted with the help of Natural Language Processing methods in order to find text similarities and differences between the libri ordinarii .