Merian online

• Applicant: Doris Schirra
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Early Modern History ; German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature) ; Art History ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 471273874

The project "Merian online" aims at indexing Matthaeus Merian's and Martin Zeiller's outstanding early modern topographic work comprehensively and presenting it in a scientifically usable form. The topographies contain the complete collection of all 30 volumes, which are at the unlimited availability of the University Library of Trier (ULT). They include (in the editions available to the ULT) 3314 text pages, 92 maps and 2142 individual views of cities and villages. As a complete collection, all volumes of the topography are to be digitised in high quality and fully indexed to provide a uniform data basis. The project is intended to offer simplified and at the same time extended access to the illustrations as well as the descriptions of the countries or regions, cities and villages of the entire series, which can then be used by scientists for research and teaching purposes. For this task, current librarian methods and procedures of indexing will be used, with a particular focus on linking the project to the standardised data from the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND, Common Norms File) of the German National Library. This will allow a clear identification of locations, person names, buildings, and so on. By standardising the keywords, the works printed in Fraktur font and edited in a now obsolete linguistic style will be usable ubiquitously, i.e. independently of German language skills or very specific previous historical knowledge for the first time. This will not only increase the accessibility of the topography beyond its local use, but will also provide researchers with the opportunity to go further than simple scans, facsimile reproductions or transcriptions.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Jörg Röpke