2017-07-05 | IMC Leeds #1104

Digital Approaches to Jewish History in Medieval Germany

epidat

Database of Jewish Epigraphy

Data: https://github.com/KollatzThomas/2017_Leeds_IMC
Slides: https://kollatzthomas.github.io/2017_Leeds_IMC

Thomas Kollatz | @kol_t | KollatzThomas | CC-BY 4.0
Mainz – Academy of Science and Literature / Digital Academy
Essen – Steinheim-Institut for German-Jewish History

History and Scope

• developed since 2002
• online since 2006
• driven by projects

• 180 digital editions of historic Jewish cemeteries
• 33.000 inscriptions
• with 63.000 digital images

Space

Time span

Languages

Examples

flowers and shoes

Lilies of Worms

A unique floral symbol found "Im Heiligen Sand" – Worms

Lilies of Worms

spatio-temporal vizualized in the DARIAH-DE Geo-Browser

• place
• date
• symbol
• name

Michael Brocke: The lilies of Worms. In: Zutot 8 (2011), 3-13
http://steinheim-institut.de/cgi-bin/epidat?info=geobrowser&lang=en

Shoes of Frankfurt

A Frankfurt house emblem becoming a familyname

… and displaying 200 years of shoe-design engraved in headstones

step 1: licence

☞ Use free and open licences

• epidat research data are released online under an open Creative Commons Licence

research data should be provided under an open and free licence.

step 2: interoperability

☞ provide your data according to a standard format
☞ make them available via an interface

• epidat data are encoded in html a format for readers, which provides our epigraphical research data by the means of webdesign, typography in a structured form
• epidat data are also provided for users in EpiDoc: TEI XML for Epigraphic Documents, which provides research data in a machine readable, structured data format, which is widely used by (digital) epigraphers

☞ rule

research data should be provided

• in a machine readable format
• in a system-independent format
• in a program-independent documented standard format
• via interfaces

TEI XML

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts …

see: http://www.tei-c.org

Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML

EpiDoc is an international, collaborative effort that provides guidelines and tools for encoding scholarly and educational editions of ancient documents. It uses a subset of the Text Encoding Initiative's standard for the representation of texts in digital form and was developed initially for the publication of digital editions of ancient inscriptions

<!-- person -->
<profileDesc>
 <particDesc>
    <listPerson>
        <person xml:id="ffb-80-1" sex="1">
            <persName ref="http://d-nb.info/gnd/11879132X">
             Meir Rothschild ben Anschel Rothschild
            </persName>
            <death when="1812-09-19"/> 
        </person>
    </listPerson>
 </particDesc>
 <langUsage>
    <language ident="he" usage="100">Hebrew</language>
 </langUsage>
 </profileDesc>

see: https://sourceforge.net/p/epidoc/wiki/Home/

step 3: Controlled vocabularies

☞ Use Thesauri and Authority files

• the symbol Lilie can be traced in Iconclass a multilingual classification system for cultural content
• the object or concept shoe is found in Arts and Architecture Thesaurus to improve access to information about art, architecture, and material culture
• the settlement Frankfurt on the Main is identified in the Thesaurus of Geographic Names and by this distinguished from two other German towns named Frankfurt
• names of persons have unique identifiers in the GND-database of the German National Library and other National Library catalogues

Linked Open Data – simple

http://steinheim-institut.de/cgi-bin/epidat?id=ffb-80-1
http://steinheim-institut.de/daten/beacon.txt

Beacon

Only by providing the GND-Identification-number more information about the person in question is on the fly dynamically provided by automatically harvesting other online databases based on the GND-ID 11879132X

• easy
• effective

Linked Open Data – advanced

• From EpiDoc – TEI XML
• via xTripels webservice
• to semantic RDF statements (Triples)