Karl Kraus contra …, or: text contra action

In the project to be presented, the legal papers of the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936) are being edited according to the TEI Guidelines and will be provided digitally and contextualized with Kraus’ oeuvre as a whole. Kraus welcomed the reform of the Austrian Press Law of 1922, which marked the beginning of the writer’s 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. 

The material documenting these actions is the focus of our project. Even though the material’s volume (approx. 8000 pages) is a challenge in itself, the most demanding aspect of these documents is their heterogeneity: typescripts, manuscripts, pre-printed forms, carbon copies, and receipts are only some examples of material types we are working with. In addition to the diverse materialities, the heterogeneous functions of the materials (statements, summons, verdicts, correspondences, etc.) pose a challenge as the exact functions of document types have to be understood before the document’s qualities can be encoded.  

In this paper, we will focus on the document characteristics that are not per se inherent in the text these documents carry, i.e. the documents’ functions in relation to real-world processes such as court actions and daily procedures in a lawyer’s office. As suggested by Hannesschläger and Andorfer (2019: 8), “the Text Encoding Initiative’s guidelines, while the unquestionably best approach for encoding text inherent phenomena, reach their limits when used for encoding ‘real world phenomena’ related to text genesis”.

One of the approaches to tackle this problem is to develop a taxonomy in SKOS format to model these processes, i.e. a reusable, TEI-external classification scheme of text types that include different types of juridical documents, court actions, and the procedures in a lawyer’s office. In this paper, we will introduce the project, explain our approach and describe the integration of our SKOS taxonomy into the TEI documents containing the texts of our edition by making use of the versatile @ana attribute and the possibilities to include external metadata within the <xenoData> element. 
 

References

Vanessa Hannesschläger, Peter Andorfer. I Want it All, I Want it Now. Literature researcher meets programmer. In Steven Krauwer, Darja Fišer (Eds.). Twin Talks at DHN2019: Understanding Collaboration in DH. Proceedings. Copenhagen 2019. URL: https://cst.dk/DHN2019Pro/TwinTalksWorkshopProceedings.pdf