2018-06-12 | Utrecht

workshop All that remains

Digital Approaches to Cemeteries

Preservation and Education

Slides: https://kollatzthomas.github.io/20180611_Utrecht/

Thomas Kollatz | @kol_t | KollatzThomas | CC-BY 4.0

Justification of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV)

Jewish sites nominated for UNESCO World Heritage List

1. Old Synagogue and Mikveh in Erfurt – Testimonies of everyday life, religion and town history between change and continuity (15/02/2015)

   […] and singular authentic objects: […]  as well as around 60 preserved tombstones from the 13th to 15th century from the former Jewish cemetery.

2. ShUM cities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz (15/01/2015)

   To this day the cemetery in Worms, largely preserved in its original state, is a site that is also visited by many Jews from all over the world for individual and collective remembrance at the graves and epitaphs of scholars, martyrs and other distinguished figures and is therefore a place of living Jewish tradition of universal significance. It is also sought out by many Christians who are aware of the extensive similarities between Judaism and Christianity. The same goes, but to a more limited extent, for the memorial cemetery in Mainz.

3. The Jewish Cemetery of Altona Königstraße. Sephardic Sepulchral Culture of the 17th and 18th century between Europe and the Caribbean (15/01/2015)

   The Ashkenazi part of the cemetery features some 6,500 tombstones of exceptional value: Particularly the tombs of rabbis excel in the sheer text volume of their inscriptions, their literary quality and external ornaments (…). There is no other Jewish cemetery in the whole of Germany that has a similar number of rabbis’ tombstones of equal importance.

UNESCO tentative Lists

epidat

Research Platform for Jewish Epigraphy

• developed since 2002
• online since 2006
• driven by projects
• various disciplinary perspectives

epidat – amount of data

space – topograpie

• Germany [170]
• Lithunia [4]
• The Netherlands [7]
• Czechia [5]

http://steinheim-institut.de/cgi-bin/epidat?info=map

time – chronology

From 11^th until 20^th century. Currently 1.100 dated medieval inscriptions from seven communities:

• שו״ם | Schum:
  • Speyer
  • Worms
  • Mainz
• Frankfurt
• …

http://steinheim-institut.de/cgi-bin/epidat?suche=*&function=searchall&lang=de&check=2&sm=AND&wo=ed&beg=1050&end=1519

Languages

epidat – access options

Browse

• chronological
  • by year
  • by period
• topographical
  • by place
  • by region
  • by map
• visual – by images

Access

• via full-text search
• via indices
  • artists and stonemasons
  • memorials
  • symbols
    • ornaments
    • house-symbols
  • persons
  • languages
  • words and abbrevations
  • list of words
    • words only used on headstones for men | women etc.
  • quotations
  • monument preservation activities

Analyze /w embedded webservices

• for visualization
  • DARIAH-DE Geo-Browser for spatio-temporal visualisation
• for annotation
  • DARIAH-DE Annotation Service

02

transdisciplinarity

Wide range of perspectives

on …

text

text constitution | edition

image

symbols | ornaments | decoration

textbearing objects

form | shape | material

relations

intertextuality

inter-culturality

spatial relations between objects

headstone is part of a row | a field | a section | the cemetery

Form follows Function

What characterises this class of objects is that they form a whole with their physical support. Indeed, the meaning of an epigraph cannot be fully understood without the analysis of the object or monument or other archaeological object on which it appears, just as one cannot fully understand the nature of that particular archaeological object without thoroughly investigating the sense of the inscription or iconographic representation it hosts

Felicetti et al., 2016

03

examples

Mainz, Gedenkfriedhof (mz1-2203)

‎‏זה קבר של הרב ר׳ מאיר בר אברהם הכהן הזקן הנהרג על יחוד השם במ״א לפרט כ״ז בסיון ביום שנשרף בית הכנסת ונקרעו סיפרי תורה מנוחתו כבוד‏‎

mz1-2203 – foto by LDA Mainz

name

Meir b. Awraham HaCohen

date

1281-06-15 | 27. Sivan 5041

event

destruction of the synagogue and the torascrolls: ביום שנשרף בית הכנסת ונקרעו סיפרי תורה

concept

הנהרג על יחוד השם

dislocation

headstone was found by workers on 5. Juni 1899 in the cellar of the inn "Zur Stadt Mainz" in the street Große Bleiche

Hamburg-Altona, Königstraße (hha-2338)

hha-2338 – foto by Bert Sommer

ornaments

palmette

symbols

magen david | hammer

name and origin

David Hammerschlag from Hildesheim

intertextuality

Allusions on biblical David

2 Sam. 15:30 דוד עלה במעלה

1 Kings 2.1 ויקרבו ימי דוד למות

Shoes of Frankfurt

A Frankfurt house emblem becoming a familyname

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

cultural impact

HyperImage Lighting Table with cans (Hamburg chronologically)

Daily Live

Agricultural equipment: The plough

1637	1654	1710	1726	1784	1794

Urban Architecture		Fashion
1722	1726	1716

04

Data-management

Preservation

	epidat research data
licence	are released online under an open Creative Commons Licence
interoperability	are encoded in html a format for readers, which provides our epigraphical research data by the means of webdesign, typography in a structured form and in EpiDoc: TEI XML for Epigraphic Documents for users, thus providing research data in a machine readable, system-independent, program-independent and structured data format, which is widely used by (digital) epigraphers
controlled vocabularies	are mapped to authority files and thesauri
interfaces	are provided via a machine readable and documented interface

Licences

Recommendation: CreativeCommons Choose a licence

source: Rufus Pollock

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

https://sourceforge.net/p/epidoc/wiki/Home/
http://www.stoa.org/epidoc/gl/latest/

EpiDoc TEI XML

It addresses not only the transcription and editorial treatment of texts themselves, but also the history and materiality of the objects on which the texts appear.

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

<profileDesc>
 <particDesc> <!-- participation description -->
    <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>

ffb-80-1 html | EpiDoc TEI XML

authority files and thesauri

authority files & controlled vocabularies

• place names (ancient) – Pleiades
• place names (in the Hebrew Script) – Kima Historical Gazeteer An open, attestation based, historical database
• physical form | symbols | material
  • EAGLE [The Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy] vocabularies

By using controlled vocabularies project-specific findings are addressed by unique identifiers [digital shelf mark]

Metadata

Why store data about an object, when you have the object itself?
Because without data about the objects contained in a space, any sufficiently complex space is indistinguishable from chaos.

Pomerantz 2017

Linked Open Data – in practice

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

By providing the GND-Identification-number more information about the person in question is on the fly dynamically provided by harvesting other online databases, which also refer to the person with the unique identifier 11879132X

• easy
• effective
• inspiring new | further research

epidat included in German Digital Library

vice versa: our data a available outside our limited domain

Semantic Web

subject      predicate       object .

epidat-ID    sameAS         GND-ID .
ffb-80-1     sameAS         11879132X .

https://deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/entity/11879132X

XML Silo | container

<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>

Semantic Web is breaking down the data silos

Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data

Open Data provide useful information for third parties

spatial relations

rationale

A single object – the headstone – is always part of an ensemble – the cemetery

• DARIAH-DE Geobrowser for spatio-temporal visualization across corpora
• topographic navigation within a corpus
• 3D model of an cemetery with linked data – virtual tour
• 2D dynamic maps – searching for patterns | data analysis

Working /w Tacheometer on Hamburg cemetery
(team-leader: Tobias Arera-Rütenik)

Spatial relations

• terrestrial laserscan
• structured data
• Linking scatter plot points (3D model) /w epigraphic research Data (epidat/EpiDoc TEI XML) via the XTripels Webservice: RDF-Lifting from XML

Workshop: IBR/RiR

Spatial relations

looking for patterns

RiR-project 2012-2015 | template: Howto make a dynamic map

Agile workflow

damage report שו״ם

1. inventarisation: photographic record and – if possible – map
2. documentation: and digital editing
3. damage description
4. restoration plan
5. monitoring restoration works
6. documentation (description and photo)

restoration activities Hamburg

Translation tool

Identifies quotations, names, places, dates, idioms – dynamic dictionaries

developed by T. Kollatz

Digital Epigraphy and Traditional Epigraphy

The structure of an XML document reflects the structure of an epigraphic edition. Following the strict hierarchy of XML forces one to better organise one’s thoughts, approach towards, and work on an epigraphic document. We have found that it is highly beneficial to be able to process and produce information in a well structured and clearer way, even if the students do not show interest in further DH training.

Bodard and Stoyanova 2016

structure vs fuzziness

Thus, for the traditionally trained epigrapher (classicist, humanist) an EpiDoc or a more general DH training leaves the sense of a distinct change of methodology. This change, however, is usually perceived as an improvement, the ‘scientific’ methodology adding more detail and nuances to the publication, though sometimes it can leave an uncomfortable feeling of not being allowed any fuzziness.

Bodard and Stoyanova 2016

Sharing Data

PEACE Portal and DARIAH-DE

	IIP – Inscriptions of Israel | Palestine	epidat – Database of Jewish Epigraphy	DIO – Deutsche Inschriften Online
online
quantity	3,589	34,278	ca. 18,000
time	500 BCE - 640 CE	midth 11th - 20th century	500-1650 CE
space	Israel | Palestine	Germany | The Netherlands | Czechia | Lithunia	Germany | Austria | South Tyrol
Genre	Different	Funeral Inscriptions	Different
Format	EpiDoc: TEI XML for Epigraphic Documents
Example	QUAMR0001	ffb-80	34-561

Literature & Software

Digital Epigraphy and EpiDoc

• Tom Elliott, Gabriel Bodard, Hugh Cayless et al. (2006-2017), EpiDoc: Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML. Online material, available: <http://epidoc.sf.net>
• Julia Flanders; Charlotte Roueché: Gentle Introduction To Mark-Up For Epigraphers
• Bodard G. & Stoyanova S. 2016. Epigraphers and Encoders: Strategies for Teaching and Learning Digital Epigraphy. In: Romanello M. & Bodard G, Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber. London: Ubiquity Press.
• H. Cayless; C.M. Roueché; Tom Elliott; Gabriel Bodard (2009): "Epigraphy in 2017." Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.1. http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000030/000030.html