"Retro-editing": The edition of an edition of the Karl Kraus legal papers

In the project Intertextuality in the Legal Papers of Karl Kraus. A Scholarly Digital Edition, the legal papers of the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936) are being edited and will be provided digitally and contextualized with Kraus’ oeuvre as a whole. In this poster, the digitization and editing process of the project will be described. As the preconditions of this digital edition are quite unique, the poster will focus on the project’s specific initial situation, the available material, and its processing.

Historical context

Although Karl Kraus’s attitude towards the courts in the Habsburg period had been predominantly critical, the constitutional reform of the Austrian Republic in 1919 and the abolition of death penalty marked a decisive break for the author. He especially welcomed the reform of the Press Law of 1922, which marked the beginning of a growing fondness for litigation. In the same year, Oskar Samek became his lawyer. In the course of the following 15 years, they were involved in over 200 court actions together.

Initial position and starting point

The material documenting these actions is held by the Vienna City Library. As this corpus consists of roughly 8000 sheets of paper, transcribing and editing all these documents in the course of a three year project with three persons staff would be unfeasible. Luckily, transcription is only a minor part of the project members’ tasks: In 1995, Hermann Böhm published the records of cases from the Karl Kraus papers as a ‘mixed edition’ (“Mischedition”) in four volumes (of roughly 300 pages each). However, Böhm made a number of editorial decisions which are today out of date and not suited for a digital format, which is why a new edition of this material has become a desideratum among Kraus researchers.

Workflow of the text creation process

The Böhm-edition, which is today exhausted, was digitized and OCRed by the project team. The result of this process (carried out with Tesseract) serves as the basis for the new, digital edition. The OCRed text is transformed into XML- and subsequently TEI-files, which are edited using the oXygen XML editor. In a first step, OCR mistakes are corrected and the text state of the Hermann Böhm-edition is restored. In a second step, the Böhm-text is compared to the original documents. While Böhm had left out parts of the texts (e.g. address lines and salutations in letters) and even entire documents (e.g. Böhm wrote short introductions for each court action which include information on hearing dates etc., but did not include the summons in his edition), the digital edition’s aim is to provide the corpus in its entirety. Therefore, the missing text parts and documents are supplemented in the second step. At the same time, mistakes made by Böhm are corrected and normalisations reversed.

Digital resources to enrich the edition

The Karl Kraus Online platform is not (or only rudimentarily) interconnected with other digital resources. The platform provides metadata for the documents presented (date, place,  type of document, persons involved, institutions involved), but apart from the person data none of them are connected to structured digital data resources. In the digital edition, we will therefore build on the work done in Karl Kraus Online and use the data already collected by enriching, expanding, and interconnecting it with other resources.

As suggested by the project title „Intertextuality in the Legal Papers of Karl Kraus“, the underlying research question that is driving the development of the digital edition described focuses on the interconnections of Kraus’ legal papers with other texts. As mentioned above, many of the court actions developed out of Kraus’ protest against denigrative reports and newspaper articles about both him personally (often referencing his Jewish heritage and the fact that he converted from Judaism to Catholic faith) and his work as a writer, satirist, and performer. In some cases the articles were lost or stolen from the physical collection. Luckily, the Austrian National Library has successfully implemented a large scale historical newspaper digitization project, which offers a IIIF interface which we will use to enrich and complete the digital edition at hand.

The most interesting resource for learning about Kraus’ way of thinking and mode of (literary) argumentation is his magazine Die Fackel, which was a periodical published, edited, and (at the time of the court actions) exclusively authored by Kraus. The author did not only act legally against his offenders, but also made their offenses the topic of his own articles and writings. Investigating similarities, differences and interconnections between his Fackel articles and the applications, the correspondences with (potential and actual) defendants, and of course the rulings by the courts will therefore give the most meaningful insights into questions of intertextuality. Again, the project team can rely on a valuable resource already available in digital form: Die Fackel was fully digitized, edited and made available online by the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ institute Austrian Academy Corpus AAC in 2007. Thanks to its current modernization, the Online Fackel will soon be openly available online and we will not only be able to investigate intertextualities between the legal papers and the Fackel, but also to make them available to users of our edition in a structured form.

Conclusion / Outlook

At the end of the project, we will be able to offer both a laywo/man friendly interface and an expert view of the Kraus legal papers thanks to the resources already available. We hope that we will have created a digital edition that does not only exploit the current means digital technology is able to offer, but also joins together the accomplishments of Böhm’s edition, Karl Kraus Online, the Fackel Online, and other resources and benefits the Kraus community as well as other fields of research by not only connecting these resources, but extending them.