The Imperial Diet of Regensburg of 1576 - a Pilot Project on the Digital Edition of sources on the Early Modern Era
Final Report Abstract
Not least the contemporary diagnosis of a crisis of representative democracy is currently stimulating international research into the diverse manifestations of having a say in the assemblies of estates in late medieval and early modern Europe. These studies were and are largely based on scholarly editions. For their part, editions endeavour to address research questions and present the source material in such a way that it can be used for many different research interests. The digital humanities (DH) and their methodological tools open up fundamentally new possibilities for research and editing alike. The aim of the pilot project was to utilise this fundamental added value in an example, the Regensburg Imperial Diet of 1576, and to rethink one of the most traditional editions of Germanlanguage historical scholarship, the "German Imperial Diet Records", from a digital perspective. A German-Austrian project team, whose members contributed editorial expertise as well as knowledge and skills in the field of DH to the project work, designed an edition committed to digital first. This type of edition "transforms" the content information of the primary sources into a logical model of standardised metadata using digital methods. This approach makes it possible, among many other things, to make the editorial content accessible to users in a more differentiated way than is the case with other digital publishing formats. In addition, the data collected can be linked to other data and, reciprocally, researchers with similar or completely different research interests can benefit from the data collected (so-called linked open data). This potential of the digital is realised in the edition of the records of the Imperial Diet of 1576. The increasingly extensive metadata provided by archives and libraries was used to systematically document the editorial selection process, which is unavoidable in any edition, and thus make it transparent ("archive documentation"). The source material is presented in a more integral, comprehensive and varied manner, containing such diverse material as current events, a legation from the Russian Tsar or adulterers addressing the councillors of Emperor Maximilian II with their concerns ("Edited Texts"). In addition, central groups of sources are made accessible as facsimiles ("Archival documents in images"), with metadata, partly transcribed and partly indexed in terms of content.
