Camerarius digital

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Thomas Baier; Professor Dr. Joachim Hamm; Professor Dr. Frank Puppe; Dr. Ulrich Schlegelmilch
• Subject Area: Greek and Latin Philology
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 319239655

"Camerarius digital" is based on its predecessor project, "Opera Camerarii". In the course of that project, an online database (Semantic MediaWiki) has been compiled, containing all of Joachim Camerarius The Elder’s printed works (including his correspondence) and bibliographically indexing them, making them easily accessible by adding short descriptions, and linking them through semantic attributes. The successor project "Camerarius digital" will provide access to Camerarius' voluminous body of Greek and Latin texts via "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) as a computer readable complete text. To that end, philologists and computer scientists work closely together in applying and optimising new methods of character recognition. The Latin works of Camerarius will be presented as quotable digitised texts. In close association with this corpus, an online lexicon will be created which contextualizes Camerarius' works in the discursive landscapes of the 16th century and visualizes their emergence and their impact. The lexicon will embed the output of the predecessor project into a broader context, profiting from the advantages of searchable digitised texts. In "Camerarius digital", computer science and philology work in close connection: OCR feeds complete texts into the wiki and allows for Camerarius' works to be systematically researched through quantitative methods (frequency analysis, topic modeling). The topic entries of the lexicon make use of all the advantages of semantic linking. As dynamic repositories of knowledge they form an interactive encyclopaedia which links to the texts generated by OCR and to the database "Opera Camerarii" and which can in turn be accessed from these. "Camerarius digital" will allow us to sharpen the previously blurry image of an influential Early Modern universal scholar and to gain a (renewed) overview of the discursive landscapes of the 16th century. The gain of the project for OCR of historical prints lies in testing and optimising the pertinent technical procedures as well as in generating training data and models, which will be created in close cooperation with philologists based on a large but manageable corpus. The gain for early modern scholarship lies in a comprehensive access to the works of an author who interacts with, collaborates within and is influenced by diverse thought collectives. Using the functionalities of the project wiki, the highly complex field of knowledge production in Early Modern times will be presented in a differentiated and user-friendly way. With this innovative linking of philology and computer science, "Camerarius digital" serves as a model of interdisciplinary cooperation in the field of historical digital humanities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants