2019-02-13 | Bar Ilan Workshop Ramat Gan , Israel

Technological Tools for Manuscript Research

Evolution of a DH-project

Turns and Trends of a Digital Epigraphic Endeavour

link to presentation https://kollatzthomas.github.io/Bar_Ilan_paper

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

Digital Epigraphy

headstone and cemetery
about epidat
Research Platform for Jewish Epigraphy

01

headstone and cemetery

headstones from nine centuries

Mainz – Gedenkfriedhof: mz1-2203
foto: LDA Mainz

‎‏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

place of burial: Mainz
name: Meir b. Awraham HaCohen
date of death | date of event: 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 June 5, 1899 in the cellar of the inn Zur Stadt Mainz in the street Große Bleiche

Hamburg-Altona, Königstraße: hha-2338
foto: Bert Sommer

place of burial: Hamburg
name: David Hammerschlag
date_of_death: 26.10.1686 | 18. Cheschvan 5447
place of origin: Hildesheim
intertextuality: Allusions on biblical David; 2 Sam. 15:30 דוד עלה במעלה; 1 Kings 2.1 ויקרבו ימי דוד למות
symbols: magen david | hammer
ornaments: palmette

Hamburg-Altona: hha-1678
foto: Bert Sommer

‎‏גם חסידה בשמים‏‎

‎‏פה שוכבת הדרת הנשים‏‎

‎‏אף גם עדים וצבי תפארתם‏‎

‎‏גמלה חסד עם הרשים‏‎

‎‏לזמנה היתה כתר מכתם‏‎

‎‏בת פו״מ כהר״ר יוסף‏‎

‎‏פופרט אשת כ״ה משה‏‎

‎‏אפינהיי׳ הגובה באלטונא‏‎

‎‏נפטר׳ ונקבר׳ יום ב׳ ך״ז טבת‏‎

‎‏שנת כצפור נודדת מקנה‏‎

‎‏תנצב״ה ‏‎

place of burial: Hamburg
name(s): Vogel; father Josef Popert; husband Moshe Oppenheim
task: הגובה באלטונא‏‎ charity administrator
date_of_death: 03.01.1791 | 27. Tewet 5551
symbol: bird
style: rhyme, meter, acrostic, chronostic

A Cemetery is a spatial ensemble of timebound objects

cultural impact

HyperImage Lighting Table with cans (Hamburg chronologically)

shoes

depicting relation between persons and houses
former housesymbol became part of name
symbols depicting contemporary design

transdisciplinary perspectives

on headstone (single object) and cemetery (ensemble)

text(s)	text constitution \| edition \| philology
image(s)	symbols \| ornaments \| decoration \| arthistory
textbearing object	form \| shape \| material \| monument preservation
relations	genealogy \| intertextuality \| inter-culturality \| spatial relations between objects – headstone is part of a row, a field, a section of the cemetery
history	names (onomatics) \| persons (prosopography \| events \| ideas - values - mentalities

02

about epidat

epidat

2002 set up as a database in order to manage the inventarisation of about 6.000 headstones from the Ashkenazic Cemetery in Hamburg-Altona (1621-1871) and to enable a team of 10-12 researchers from different places to ingest data
remote access | server based
in 2006 epidat went online
more projects followed: ongoing development of epidat is driven by projects and cooperations for seventeen years already

Hamburg, Königstraße foto by Bert Sommer

scope

cemeteries	199
headstones	35,494
images	69,393
persons	31,456
dates	24,191
places	190
countries	4

www.steinheim-institut.de/cgi-bin/epidat

beta version (2019/03)

time-based access options

search for hebrew year

yahrzeit

Browse the digital editions

by year, month, day
by period
with spatio-temporal geobrowser
full-text search in one, several or all collections

location-based access options

Browse by place or region

full-text search in one, several or all collections

spatio-temporal-visualisation with geobrowser

personal data

list of names

collection of names
date of death according to common date
date of death according to hebrew date
Link to edition of headstone
linked data

	epidat research data
licence	are released online under an open Creative Commons Licence
standard format	are provided in EpiDoc: TEI XML for Epigraphic Documents for machine readable, system-independent, program-independent and structured access (and widely used by digitalepigraphers)
interoperability	are mapped to authority files, controlled vocabularies and thesauri
interfaces	are provided via a machine readable interface (e.g. in order to re-use the data)

03

Research Platform for Jewish Epigraphy

source: Rufus Pollock

open cultural data landscape

http://www.poeticrelief.org

During the first German cultural hackathon, Coding da Vinci, where the Steinheim Institute acted as participating cultural institution and partner, the epidat dataset was presented and the website was developed from it in order to present the grave inscriptions in a new way.

http://www.poeticrelief.org/faq

visualising DH data sets

DHd2016 Leipzig / Pre-Conference Workshop For the visualisations, data sets from the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institut for Jewish-German History and the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz have been used.

Kollatz-Kuczera-Schrade 2016

<listPerson>
  <person xml:id="hha-3361-1" sex="1">
   <persName>Schmuel ben Jehuda</persName>
   <death when="1621-08-17"/>
  </person>
  <listRelation>
   <relation name="parent" active="#hha-3361-1" passive="#hha-2437-1 #hha-6241-1"/>
   <relation name="spouse" mutual="#hha-3360-1 #hha-3361-1"/>
 </listRelation>
</listPerson>

hha-3361-teip5

Visualizing family relations

Torsten Schrade

Inspiration for this example drawn from a discussion about visualizing XML based relationships on the TEI mailinglist. Credits and thanks to Thomas Kollatz for the idea. The RDF extraction is modelled on FOAF to represent persons, BIO to represent dates of death and REL to build family relations between persons. Visualization is done using the Sgvizler library and it's Dracula Graph implementation.

about XTripels

Linked Open Data

From EpiDoc – TEI XML
via XTripels webservice
to semantic RDF-statements (Triples)

demo: http://xtriples.spatialhumanities.de | code: https://github.com/spatialhumanities/xtriples
presentation: Torsten Schrade (Digitale Akademie Mainz): CIDOC-CRM Modellierung epigraphischer Fachdaten mit dem XTriples Webservice - Werkstattbericht aus dem DARIAH UseCase 6.1 (Steinheim-Institut & ADWLM)

3D model of Jewish Cemetery Mainz

School of Technology – Geoinformatics and Surveying Mainz had made with students a terrestrial laserscan
Steinheim-Institut (epidat) has worked on edition of the cemeterey and has structured data
Torsten Schrade, Academy of Science and Literature, Mainz, had developed a webservice to extract RDF statements from XML-Data
joint workshop on linking scatter plot points (3D model) with epigraphic research Data (epidat/EpiDoc TEI XML) via the XTripels Webservice: RDF-Lifting from XML

Workshop: IBR/RiR

Spatial relations

looking for patterns

zoom in	zoom out
single object	ensemble
object	context
discovering patterns	units: rows \| fields

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

shape and form

Change in funeral tradition happens slowly. Change manifests itself not only in textual tradition. Cultural change is also reflected in the use of (new) forms. Text and form do not develop synchronously

Genderdistribution

bar chart Legende

1	male
2	female
0	unknown
9	not defined

Configuration

Visualisierung http://app.rawgraphs.io

Sharing Data

	IIP Inscriptions of Israel \| Palestine	epidat Research Platform for Jewish Epigraphy	DIO Deutsche Inschriften Online
online
time	500 BCE - 640 CE	midth 11^th - 20^th century	500-1650 CE
space	Israel Palestine	Germany Netherlands Czechia Lithuania	Germany Austria South Tyrol
Genre	Different	Funeral Inscriptions	Different
Format	EpiDoc: TEI XML for Epigraphic Documents
Example	QUAMR0001	ffb-80	34-561

PEACE Portal and DARIAH-DE

F I N I S

סוף דבר הכל נשמע

Software and Literature

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

Presentations

Kollatz, Thomas. “Digitale Approaches to Cemeteries: Preservation and Education.” presented at the All that remains: Education and Conservation of Jewish Funerary Culture, Utrecht, June 12, 2018.
Kollatz, Thomas. “Epigraphische Datenbanken zu den Schum-Gedenkstätten: Status Quo und Desiderata.” presented at the Intensivworkshop Informationssysteme, Mainz Coworking Area im Dock 39, March 5, 2018.
Kollatz, Thomas. “epidat – Forschungsplattform zur jüdischen Grabsteinepigraphik: Edition, Kommentierung, Annotation, Visualisierung und Analyse jüdischer Grabmale aus neun Jahrhundert.” presented at the Vortragsreihe des IZED im Sommersemester 2018: Annotation Kommentar Erläuterung, Wuppertal, May 29, 2018.
Kollatz, Thomas, and Max Grüntgens. “Annotieren, analysieren, visualisieren. Repositorien mergen, analysieren und visualisieren.” presented at the DARIAH-DE Grand Tour, Darmstadt, September 20, 2018.
Andreas Kuczera, Thomas Kollatz und Torsten Schrade: Methods and Tools for visualising Digital Humanities data sets, DHd 2016 Leipzig

Software

Impress.js (presentation)
Magnific Popup (Lightbox)
Unite Gallery (photo gallery)