A corpus of stadium reviews in German architecture journals, 1912-2011

The 92 stadium reviews we identified show how the architecture of football stadiums was thought about at different times and in different political contexts in 20th century Germany. In terms of sources, our new corpus of stadium reviews is based on a systematic evaluation of various libraries and online databases comprising German architectural and building journals. Most reviews come from Bauwelt, Deutsche Bauzeitung and Deutsche Bauzeitschrift, but there are also numerous relevant contributions in less widely circulated publication organs. Most of the historical issues of relevant German architecture and building journals are still not available in a digitised format, i.e. the digitisation had to be undertaken by the authors themselves. This involved first taking high-resolution photos of the reviews in the libraries, which could then be translated into machine-readable text using professional OCR software (Abby FineReader). Subsequently, manual error correction was essential.