Imperial Diet of Regensburg of 1576 — A digital edition

The digital scholarly editing project “Der Regensburger Reichstag von 1576” (The Imperial Diet in Regensburg, 1576) is a collaboration between the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the Center for Information Modelling at the University of Graz. It is the latest edition in the long-term editorial endeavor “Reichstagsakten: Reichsversammlungen, 1556–1662” series and a pioneer project and will hopefully serve as a model for future editions of Imperial Diet records as it uses a “digital first” publishing approach.

The project has two primary goals: 1) to compile an overview over the rich written documentation of the event preserved in written records in various archives (several thousand documents) in the form of a list of manuscript descriptions; 2) to edit key documents of the “Reichstag” and enrich them using a TEI transcription model. A number of relevant documents have already been edited by the Historical Commission and exist in a simple text format. These texts will be converted to TEI and enriched with basic meta information using a semi-automated process. The focus of the project is on the many facets and complex communicative events at and around the Imperial Diet and the project team tries to systematically organise the information about these communicative events using an ontology. Using the TEI @ana attribute pointer to concepts in the ontology will be embedded in the TEI. It is hoped that this method will generate new knowledge about events, communication acts, participants, topics being discussed, etc. at and around the Imperial Diet of 1576.

The project team proposes a poster that will briefly outline the project and its goals, and present in detail the semi-automated digital enrichment workflow used to create the TEI transcriptions, the ontological model of communication will be presented and how it will be implemented in the TEI enriched transcriptions.