Category: Projects

OTA (Oxford Text Archive)

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The Oxford Text Archive hosts AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics. The OTA works closely with members of the Arts and Humanities academic community to collect, catalogue, and preserve high-quality electronic texts for research and teaching. We actively support the aims of the Digital Medievalist Project. The OTA is always interested in deposits of electronic resources from medievalists (and other subject areas). For more information e-mail info@ota.ox.ac.uk

Nomen et Gens

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Homepage

Description

Nomen et gens is an interdisciplinary research project in which historians and linguists work together. The centerpiece of the project is a database which contains information concerning the prosopography and the onomastics of continental Europe in the Early Middle Ages.

  • Geographical coverage: continental Europe
  • Date range: 4th century to the 8th century AD
  • Material included: narrative and documentary sources, inscriptions, names on coins

The data has been gathered peripherally since the mid-nineties and shall now be made publicly available online. Currently, the publicly accessible areas of this database feature only a portion of the material. Published data so far:

• date range: persons and names stemming from the period between 650 to 750 AD • over 10.000 single references of personal names in ca. 300 sources • ca. 3.800 particular identified persons • ca. 1.700 linguistic lemmata of personal names

You may find a list of the already processed sources on the project homepage ([1]). In contrast, the internal sections do not only contain considerably more references, but also provide more details. Of course, the publicly accessible area is going to increase since we are processing selected data for online publication. The primary objective of the project is to enhance our comprehension of the transformation of the Roman World at the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. For that purpose we make available personal names, which have not yet been taken into account as historic-cultural or etymological sources. Furthermore, a prosopography of the continental European gentes ranging from the 4th century to the 8th century AD is being developed.

Keywords

  • Languages: German, English
  • Disciplines: History, Prosopography, Linguistic

Links and references

  • H. Ebling, J. Jarnut, G. Kampers: Nomen et gens. Untersuchungen zu den Führungsschichten des Franken-, Langobarden- und Westgotenreiches, in: Francia 8 (1980), S. 687-745.
  • D. Geuenich, I. Runde (Hgg.): Name und Gesellschaft im Frühmittelalter. Personennamen als Indikatoren für sprachliche, ethnische, soziale und kulturelle Gruppenzugehörigkeiten ihrer Träger (Deutsche Namenforschung auf sprachgeschichtlicher Grundlage, Bd. 2), Hildesheim 2006

Team

  • Philippe Depreux
  • Dieter Geuenich
  • Hans Werner Goetz
  • Wolfgang Haubrichs
  • Jörg Jarnut
  • Gerhard Lubich
  • Steffen Patzold

Contact

neg@uni-tuebingen.de
Nomen et Gens Seminar für mittelalterliche Geschichte Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Wilhelmstraße 36 72074 Tübingen

Monasterium

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The virtual archive Monasterium is the largest archive for medieval documents, containing more than 250 000 documents (as of Apr. 2012), as plain text, image or both.

History

The project Monasterium took off in the Austrian province of Lower Austria, which is rich in monasteries. From their founding in the high Middle Ages, these monasteries have stood without interruption, so that this region can boast an unbroken archival tradition. As a result of their great historical meaning, these archives guard the better part of the tradition and history of this country from the Middle Ages and early Modern Period. The strong historical relations between the monasteries and throughout the surrounding country establish the ideal conditions to realize the possibility of a virtual retrieval system of these broadly distributed sources. Spreading out from the St. Pölten episcopal archive, work on this project began with the energetic support of government and the monasteries themselves.

From project to institution The logical consequence of the project with the Lower Austrian monasteries was reaching out to the other Austrian provinces and the countries neighboring Austria. With the support of the Austrian State Ministry for Education, Art and Culture (Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur) and the European Union, Monasterium has succeeded in finding the financial support to manage a further out-reach effort. With this, the many already existing connections between the archives could finally be merged in June 2006. The Memorandum created for this has since then presented the underlying basis for collaboration in the Consortium. However, the Consortium did not intend to stand on this document permanently, and has striven to further develop itself. This lead to the November 2007 creation of a basic declaration of intent, in which the emerging network and its connected virtual archive established a more enduring common union in ICARus (International Centre for Archival Research).

Content and originality

The virtual archive Monasterium contains more than 250 000 documents (as of Apr. 2012) from more than 98 European archives. The documents are organized in 540 archival fonds and research collections. The content of the virtual archive depends on the decisions of the participants. It can vary from archive to archive, from collection to collection. Each document (mostly charters) have at least minimal metadata such as shelf mark and date and abstract. Each institution can download on Monasterium’s servers:

  • digitized images (387 000 images as of Apr. 2012, since more than one image can be related to one document)
  • full text (22 000 charters)

This platform specific features are:

  • Technical
    • Mutualized infrastructure and development for many institutions,
    • Hosting of digital images
    • Long-term preservation
  • Scientific
    • Collaboration & crowdsourcing
    • Scientific moderation through qualified experts
  • Administrative
    • Large scale visibility of local and small archives
    • Free of charge for participating institutions

The development is done at the University of Cologne for ICARUS (International Centre for Archival Research), which gathers more than 130 members in 25 countries in Europe and the Canada.

Crowdsourcing tool

Users have the possibility to transcribe the documents and to correct the plain text or descriptions. The system is moderated (expert users have to review the transcriptions before the publication) The editing tool currently is migrating from Java to Ajax (Apr. 2012).

The software behind the platform (the “Monasterium Collaborative Archive” MOM-CA) is open source. You can find the documentation at [1].

Source(s): Crowdsourcing tool

KundigeBok

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The kundige bok digital edition, together with its critical and methodological introduction. Kundige bok is a 15th century manuscript dealing with regula-tions for everyday life (“Burspraken”) in the North German town Göttingen. The statutes (the text) were revised almost annually, producing a large number of deletions, additions, transpositions and comments. The exact analysis of these text layers can produce new knowledge about historical and linguistic aspects of late medieval Göttingen and about legal history in general. Textual basis for such research would be a scholarly edition of the codex. However, creating such an edition without any loss of information turned out to be impossible by conventional means. Due to the nature of this material, all text layers have to be regarded and represented equally which conflicts with the restriction of print-based publication. The idea of the project is therefore to fully exploit the features of information technology in order to interact with the user and create a dynamic output to visualise the evolution of text and law (its written and oral form).

Malte Rehbein

Gascon Rolls Project

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Homepage

http://www.gasconrolls.org/

Description

In 1152 the future King Henry II Plantagenet of England married the divorced wife of King Louis VII of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine. This brought the great duchy of Aquitaine into the possession of the Plantagenet kings of England with momentous consequences for the history of Europe, particularly for relations between England and France. Although studies have been devoted to many aspects of the subsequent period, there are still very significant gaps in our knowledge. To a very large degree this is a result of the inaccessibility of the major source for Plantagenet rule in Aquitaine, namely the Gascon Rolls (C 61) in the U.K. National Archives.

The Gascon Rolls project has been established with the aim of making the rolls accessible to researchers. It is a collaborative project between the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool, and the Centre for the Computing in the Humanities at King’s College, University of London, and is funded by a large grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The aims of the project are ambitious, and are to provide a full calendar (summary translation) edition of all the unpublished rolls – C 61/32–144 (1317-1468). The edition will initially be provided as an online resource only. It will be available alongside high quality digital images of the original rolls provided by The National Archives (TNA). There will also be extensive indexes which will be fully searchable and a full historical introduction which will make the edition an invaluable resource for scholars. [Text reproduced from project website]

Keywords

  • Countries: England, France (Gascony, Acquitaine)
  • Dates: 1317–1468
  • Names (authors, historical figures…): King Henry II Plantagenet, Eleanor of Aquitaine
  • Disciplines (history, linguistics, literature, paleography…): History, prosopography, diplomatic

Team

University of Oxford

  • Dr Malcolm. G. A. Vale (Project Director)
  • Dr Guilhem Pépin (Research Assistant)

School of History, University of Liverpool

  • Mr Paul. H. W. Booth (Project Co-Director)
  • Dr Simon J. Harris (Research Assistant)

The Department of Digital Humanities (formerly the Centre for Computing in the Humanities), King’s College London

  • Paul Spence (Technical Research Director)
  • Dr Eleonora Litta Modignani (Lead Analyst 2008-2011)
  • Dr Elena Pierazzo (Lead Analyst 2009)
  • Paul Vetch (Lead Interface Design)
  • José Miguel Vieira (Lead Programmer)

The National Archives

  • Dr Adrian Jobson (Project Liaison until 2010)
  • Dr James Ross (Project Liaison from 2010)