Completed projects

EU
International
National

EU

The project examines how the process of Digitisation of Cultural Heritage (DCH), identified at a discursive level, is manifested in two types of settings: institutional (museums) and activist (citizen-led initiatives). The main objective of the project is to explore the plurality of discursive practices of cultural heritage digitisation in these areas, the innovative potential, discrepancies and tensions within these practices, as well as the capacity of cultural heritage digitisation to mobilise and critically engage citizens in order to open up space for intercultural dialogue.

It is a project with a comparative dimension on two levels: it compares institutional and non-institutional DCH practices, and it also compares the experiences of two cities, Novi Sad (Serbia) and Graz (Austria). They partly share a common history, culture and heritage. In a contemporary framework, the comparison aims to shed light on the social and cultural experiences of the two cities, one belonging to the member states of the European Union and the other being in the process of Europeanisation.

It is also an interdisciplinary study that crosses the boundaries of the social sciences between sociology, heritage studies and digital humanities, bringing to the forefront aspects of the cultural heritage digitisation process that have so far been neglected.

  • PI at University of Graz:
  • Ass. Prof. PhD Chiara Zuanni (Department of Digital Humanities)
  • Ass. Prof. Mag. Dr. Wolfgang Fischer (Department of Geography and Regional Science)
  • Duration: 01.03.2021 - 29.02.2024

Horizon 2020 Project ReInHerit

Redefining the Future of Cultural Heritage, through a disruptive model of sustainability

The Horizon 2020 project "ReInHerit" has set itself the task of addressing the many challenges facing the European cultural heritage sector - from climate protection and sustainability to issues relating to digitization processes and audience reach (which have become particularly topical with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic) to the lack of communication and inadequate opportunities for exchange between stakeholders in the cultural heritage sector (museums, cultural heritage management and policy, tourism and audiences):The aim is to address and develop solutions for these issues within the cultural heritage sector (museums, cultural heritage management and policy, tourism, audiences).

The aim is to create a sustainable digital network for cultural heritage . The tools and research results developed as part of the project will be presented in a Digital Hub. This Digital Hub will connect cultural heritage institutions and sites across the EU, offer all stakeholders a place for exchange, cooperation and communication and provide useful tools and guidelines (e.g. for educational purposes, for the tourism sector or for the preservation and conservation of cultural heritage).

To achieve this goal, an international team consisting of 12 project partners from 7 EU countries, with the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation as project lead partner, has joined forces. This team also includes the Department of Digital Humanities, which will be responsible for the development of the Digital Hub together with the Department of Geography and Spatial Research .

Key data on the project:

  • Project lead: Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation - BoCCF (CYP)
  • Project partner:
  • Arte Sostenible (ESP)
  • UNIFI-MICC (ITA)
  • ECTN (BEL)
  • University of Nicosia - School of Law (CYP)
  • Materahub (ITA)
  • Museum of Cycladic Art (GRC)
  • University of Graz, with the Department of Digital Humanities and Department of Geography and Spatial Research (AT)
  • CYENS (CYP)
  • BLUE SHIELD (GRC)
  • ARCADA (FIN)
  • Graz City Museum - GrazMuseum (AT)
  • Project management at the University of Graz:
  • Ass. Prof. PhD Chiara Zuanni (Department of Digital Humanities)
  • Ass. Prof. Mag. Dr. Wolfgang Fischer (Department of Geography and Spatial Research)
  • Project duration: March 1, 2021 - February 29, 2024

The Digital Hub

Further information on the project can be found on the project website.

The project is funded by a H2020-MSCA Individual Fellowship. The central research question relates to the genesis of vernacular early medieval Celtic glosses: Are the glosses originals or translations of original Latin glosses? In order to find an answer(s) to this question, a case study will be carried out on the Celtic and Latin glosses of the manuscript Vienna, Austrian National Library, Codex 15298 (olim Suppl. 2698). The two main objectives of the project are

  1. a comprehensive digital edition of the Vienna Beda with all glosses and the main text and
  2. an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to analyze early medieval (parallel) glosses, which will include methods of digital humanities, philology and linguistics.

  • Supported by: Erasmus+
  • Duration: 01.10.2018-31.08.2021
  • Project contact: Chiara Zuanni

The project aims to create a sustainable and efficient educational program dedicated to adult learners with low digital skills and low-skilled adults in the field of creative industries from Romania, Italy, Austria, Denmark, Lithuania, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The project activities are tailored to specifically meet the target of audience development and professionalization and facilitate the mutual relationship between archives and archivists and the general public across the population stratum. Partial aim behind the project is to offer a barrier-free and easily accessible doorway to the opportunities of the Digital Age in the archival sector and empower the general public to actively make use of these possibilities and thereby take part in creating and exploring shared European history. Furthermore, it is envisioned to encourage sustainable growth of the digital archival landscape, advance the qualification of young professionals by providing material for teaching purposes, sponsored internships for students, various creative competitions for pupils, students and latterly the general public audience and therewith eventually advocate social solidarity. To this end the online archival database Monasterium.net will be enhanced through additional technical and Web 2.0 features in order to meet demands of audiences with special needs as well as actively promote and facilitate community involvement. Additionally, the implementation of innovative approaches towards citizen participation (festival, "Bring your history"-days - Topotheque, MOMathons, MOMschools) will reciprocally engage the public community with the archival world and in the long run create an intertwined, heterogeneous living community.

All activities within this project serve to reach the final goal of reaching out to the general European population and build sustainable bridges between archives and the public community. Ultimately, the development of a manifold audience, historical awareness on a European level, voluntary corporate citizenship, and openings for life-long-learning and intercultural dialogue will be encouraged. The fusing of these addressed parties by the means of this project's integral activities will elucidate and detail our shared European history and energize international understanding.

The Department of Digital Humanities is engaged in this project with activities in the field of legal issues and software development.

Contact: Georg Vogeler(georg.vogeler(at)uni-graz.at) and Walter Scholger(walter.scholger(at)uni-graz.at)

 

The ZIM - ACDH has been a partner in the international doctoral program DiXiT since autumn 2013. DiXiT is an international network of public and private research institutions that are fundamentally involved in the creation and publication of digital editions. It is funded by the Marie Curie Actions in the European Commission's 7th Framework Program and runs from September 2013 to August 2017.

The 28 partners from across Europe are researching the impact of digitization on the scholarly edition of historical texts. It aims to provide the next generation of researchers with the necessary basic understanding of the problems and potential of using modern information technologies for the critical documentation and annotated reproduction of texts from various academic disciplines. The program is thus fully in line with the research focus of the ZIM, which can contribute expertise from its various editing projects.

At the heart of the program are doctoral positions located at ten leading institutions in the field of digital editing, which supervise their students in joint courses and in exchange with each other. The doctoral project based at the University of Graz deals with the question of how palaeographic research can also be made possible in the context of digital editions, e.g. in text-image linking tools and in the development of a joint palaeography and editorial model for transcription and manuscript description. In addition, a one-year post-doctoral position will develop a proposal on how established canonical reference systems of texts and digital persistent identifiers can be interwoven. As part of the project, ZIM will also organize a training course on the use of TEI for digital editions and teach units on digital archiving and metadata schemas.

More information can be found on the project page or on the DiXiT Fellows' community blog.

Project contact: Georg Vogeler

International

  • Funded by: Ministry of Culture of Serbia
  • Duration: 01.01.2025 - 30.06.2026
  • PI: Zarko Vujosevic

 

  • Funded by: Roehampton University
  • Duration: 15.08.2021 - 27.03.2026
  • PI: Georg Vogeler

This project involves the further development of a database and web interface, as well as specialist analytical and access methods for the “British Hearth Tax Online” portal, and the ingestion of additional data.

  • Funding: Volkswagenstiftung
  • Duration: 01.04.2025 - 31.12.2025
  • PI: Georg Vogeler

An essential question for the use of AI methods in scholarship is their interpretability and explainability. In research on neural networks, several approaches have been established that can be applied in many projects at both sites – whose interpretive potential could, however, also be explored in a dedicated research project.

In this collaboration, we aim to acquire and exchange relevant expertise within the teams and to publish a joint white paper on the topic. To this end, two workshops will be held, expected to take place in Graz in February and in Darmstadt in April 2025. External experts (inquiries to Gregoire Montavon (Berlin), Klaus-Robert Müller (Berlin), Benjamin Roth (Vienna)) will be invited to the workshops to provide the teams from Graz and Darmstadt with a hands-on introduction to methods of explainable AI.

Members of the two institutions’ teams and selected external guests will participate in the workshops.

  • Funded by: FWF (International, Joint Projects)
  • Duration: 01.03.2020 - 29.02.2024
  • Project contact: Georg Vogeler, Niklas Tscherne, Johannes Laroche

BeCore is a comparative study of the textual and graphic signs of authority and authentication in medieval documents. It builds on the resources of Monasterium, a portal for the publication and edition of more than 600,000 documents from all over Europe, of which about 270,000 are linked to images of the original documents. The project will integrate new corpora into Monasterium and implement tools for semi-automatic indexing and searching in images of handwritten texts as well as graphic and ornamental signs. They are based on the results of previous projects that are currently in the final phase (projects ORIFLAMMS, ANR-12-CORP-0010 and HIMANIS, European project Heritage plus, FWF-Illuminated documents). This will make it possible to examine the signs of rule and authority along several lines of research: the signs themselves, the dissemination of models and the relationships between graphic and textual signs.

"Social Justice in the Digital Humanities: Diversifying the Curriculum" develops a new open educational resource for the #dariahTeach platform. The newly proposed course will showcase projects and processes from around the world through a series of case studies, complemented by theory and concepts (e.g. social justice, curriculum diversification initiatives, data feminism).

 

The University of Virginia (UVA) has long been the leading institutional provider for documentary editing in the United States. Two of the most important collections relating to the Founding Fathers (George Washington and James Madison) have been housed for decades in the university’s Alderman Library. Likewise, Stanford University (Stanford) is responsible for the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the few major research enterprises that focuses on an African American figure.

Both UVA and Stanford have been at the forefront of digital editing and publication as well as in the digital humanities. Many of the tools, workflows, methods, publication strategies, and areas of expertise that have made the intellectual capital represented in documentary and critical editions accessible to scholars, students, and the general public were first developed at these two institutions.

Through the inclusion of the Digital Edition Publishing Cooperative for Historical Accounts (DEPCHA), the proposed cooperative draws on connections to the international community of digital humanities scholars who focus on Linked Open Data and the creation of ontologies for the exchange of humanities data on the Semantic Web. DEPCHA has fostered knowledge transfer regarding markup and publication formats for digital editions of historical accounting records between U.S. and European scholars and technologists, exchanging technical know-how developed at the Centre for Information Modelling – ZIM, Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, at the University of Graz: the Humanities Asset Management System (GAMS).

This collaboration therefore brings together extensive experience and expertise to address the critical issues, challenges, and opportunities currently facing the field of documentary editing:

  1. the lack of accessible and robust digital editing and publication platforms;
  2. questions of standardization versus customization, both within the editorial process and as integrated into technical systems;
  3. the need for diverse publication outcomes; and
  4. the immense potential for improved discoverability, enhanced accessibility, and audience expansion.

In response to these challenges and opportunities, the University of Virginia/Stanford University Digital Publishing Cooperative (“the Cooperative”) will build the necessary infrastructure to facilitate and support the conception, development, publication, discovery, preservation, and sustainability of digital editions and projects. In doing so, the Cooperative will transform documentary editing in both form and content by creating an infrastructure that makes digital editing and publishing accessible to a wider community of projects. Moreover, digital publications (both standalone and federated) emerging from cooperative projects will offer multiple modes of access and discovery, improve our understanding of history, and advance scholarly research.

By the end of the implementation period, the Cooperative will have developed:

  1. human, technical, and institutional infrastructure to support all aspects of digital publishing;
  2. a cooperative website;
  3. processes for evaluating and onboarding additional projects;
  4. a comprehensive, flexible, extensible system that supports all phases of editorial work and promotes efficient workflows;
  5. three digital publication pipelines; and
  6. a business model to sustain the Cooperative beyond the funding period.

 

  • Supported by: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Wheaton College Massachusetts
  • Duration: 2017-2023
  • Project contact: Christopher Pollin

Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and coordinated by Wheaton College Massachusetts, DEPCHA is a cooperation between the Department of Digital Humanities and partners from the USA for the semantic enrichment of digital editions of historical account books, which are to be made accessible to a broad specialist audience. Data - from different formats - are to be brought together on a common platform and open up adequate forms of retrieval, discovery and visualization to facilitate work with the sources. The transfer to RDF on the basis of the bookkeeping ontology, which formalizes the transfer processes of historical account books, allows the interoperability, linking and merging of information in the sense of Linked Open Data.

As part of the IT support and implementation of the "Research Project on the Supreme Court Database", the source material, which is currently stored and searchable in an MS Access database, will be transferred to the long-term archive (= repository) GAMS and represented there. 
The data will be modelled using relevant metadata standards (METS, MODS, TEI, RDF, OWL, SKOS, etc.) and will also be made available beyond the contract period.

  • In cooperation with the Department of History
  • Funded by: FWF (I 3446) (Internationales, Joint Projects)
  • Duration: 01.05.2018-31.10.2022
  • Project contact: Roman Bleier; Helmut Klug

The project completes the edition project "Reichstagsakten: Imperial Assemblies, 1556-1662", which was initiated by the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Since 1988, this undertaking has been supervising the edition of historical sources relating to eleven imperial assemblies, which have been published in 15 partial volumes. The aim of the current project is to electronically index the records of the Regensburg Imperial Diet of 1576, enrich them with metadata and make the research data accessible in the form of a digital edition. The tagging and descriptive enrichment of the transcriptions with XML/TEI not only guarantees the long-term availability of the research data, but also enables links to structured resources based on RDF and ontologies as well as the export of highly structured data.

  • Duration: 01.01.2020 - 31.12.2022
  • PI: Georg Vogeler
  • Project collaborator: Christopher Pollin
  • External partners: Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences (Polen), Institut für vergleichende Städtegeschichte, Münster (Deutschland), Herder Institute, Marburg (Deutschland), Natural & Built Environment, Queen's University, Belfast (Vereinigtes Königreich), Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes, Lyon (Frankreich), Institut für Digital Humanities, Universität zu Köln (Deutschland), (Digital) Humanities und (Digital) Media (DHDM), Bergische Universität Wuppertal (Deutschland), Center for Digital and Public Humanities, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia (Italien), Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth (Vereinigtes Königreich).

  • Funded by: DARIAH EU
  • Duration: 01.12.2020 - 30.11.2021
  • PI: Chiara Zuanni

The project focuses on the practices of collecting, curating, preserving, and interpreting objects and memories related to the pandemic. It will organise online events; run workshops with cultural institutions in Graz; conduct a survey and qualitative study of existing collections; develop an archive of European COVID‑19 collections; experiment with digital possibilities for curation, preservation, and interpretation of this material; and develop a thesaurus and reconciliation service.

Culinary tradition is one of the most formative elements of European culture and represents a large part of national identities. The Middle Ages and the recipes written down during this period can be regarded as the cradle of modern European cuisine. The present project aims to realize the intercultural research of medieval recipes and their interrelation by means of an interdisciplinary approach. The project takes the recipe tradition of France and the German-speaking countries, which comprises more than 80 manuscripts and around 8000 recipes, and examines them in terms of their origin, their relationship with each other and their migration through Europe. The partners, the Laboratoire CESR (Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance) of the University of Tours, the Department of Digital Humanities and the Department of Germanic Medieval Studies at the University of Graz, will process these multilingual texts according to modern standards and examine them using current quantitative and qualitative research methods.
Details can be found in the project proposal approved by the ANR.

The NERDPool project is developing a collection of gold-standard annotations for training time- and genre-specific Named Entity Recognition (NER) models for German texts. In doing so, it makes use of existing corpora that are already available at ZIM, the ACDH of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), and the University of Innsbruck (UIBK). By providing gold-standard collections, sample NER models, documentation, and training materials for the development of historical German NER models, NERDPool will make an important contribution to the scholarly community.

  • Supported by: Roehampton University and British Academy
  • Duration: 2018-2019
  • Project contact: Georg Vogeler and Jakob Sonnberger

Hearth Tax Digital is a platform for the publication of data from the English hearth taxes from the end of the 17th century. These hearth taxes were levied in England and Wales between 1662 and 1689 and provide unparalleled documentation of population and wealth distribution during a key period in English history. The Hearth Tax Digital project is the result of a collaboration with the Centre for Hearth Tax Research (University of Roehampton, UK) and is funded by the British Academy.

  • Supported by: Getty Foundation
  • Duration: 2018-2019
  • Project contact: Chiara Zuanni

This project aims to explore new applications of digital methods in digital art history with a focus on the spatial narratives of objects. By using classical art as a case study and focusing on the themes of "geographies, provenance and visualization", the project explores how Linked Open Data can further advance digital art history research.

  • Funded by: Digital Humanities Award of the National Endowment for the Humanities and German Research Foundation
  • Duration: 01.07.2015-26.04.2018
  • Project contact: Georg Vogeler

Funded by the Digital Humanities Award of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the German Research Foundation, MEDEA is a cooperation between the ZIM and partners from the USA for the semantic enrichment of digital editions of historical account books, which are to be made accessible to a broad specialist audience. Data - from different formats - are to be brought together on a common platform and offer adequate forms of retrieval, discovery and visualization to facilitate work with the materials. The transfer to RDF based on the bookkeeping ontology, which formalizes the transfer processes of historical account books, enables the interoperability, linking and consolidation of information.

  • In cooperation with the Department of History at the University of Basel
  • Duration: 03.12.2015-29.02.2016
  • Project contact: Christopher Pollin

The digital edition of Basel's Urfehdebuch X comprises the city of Basel's Urfehde entries from the years 1563 to 1569. The Urfehde describes a means of medieval law and means the sworn renunciation of feud. In collaboration with the Department of History at the University of Basel, a source corpus encoded in TEI was created that offers specific options for evaluation via a search function based on an RDF data model, indexing using various relevant categories and a "data basket" that allows the selection of individual primal feuds.

  • In cooperation with the Seminar for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Basel
  • Duration: 2014-2016
  • Project contact: Martina Scholger, Johannes Stigler

Sarajevo, Istanbul, Belgrade, Ankara: four cities in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Republic of Turkey that were once part of the Ottoman Empire. The project examines the social, cultural, political and urban developments of these four cities through the lens of local press photographers employed by major daily newspapers such as "Politika" and "Cumhuriyet" as a result of the visual revolution in the region triggered by the Balkan Wars and the First World War.

The material expands the online portal "Visual Archive Southeastern Europe", which collects historical and contemporary visual materials from Southeastern Europe. The project is being developed in cooperation with the Seminar for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Basel and is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

  • In cooperation with the Department of History at the University of Basel
  • Duration: 2013-2016
  • Project contact: Georg Vogeler

Prof. Susanna Burghartz is working on the edition of the Basel annual accounts of the 16th century, a particularly rich source for the social and economic history of the city of Basel. Building on Georg Vogeler's preliminary work on the digital edition of invoices, a semantically enriched transcription is being produced as part of the collaborative project. It will be hosted in the GAMS infrastructure project and enhanced with functionalities that make the invoices processable both as texts and as numerically analyzable entries.

  • In cooperation with the Universities of Graz and Basel
  • Duration: 2011 -2016
  • Project contact: Martina Scholger

The main aim of the Visual Archive of Southeastern European History and Anthropology of the Department of History is to collect historical and contemporary visual material on Southeastern Europe. VASE aims to draw attention to the visual as a primary source, to enhance visual studies as a technique and method, and thus to enrich primarily text-based historical-anthropological research. By providing various forms of images - such as photographs, postcards and maps - VASE also aims to critically reflect on the (self-) images of Southeastern Europe both in the academic community and in society at large.

To the project

  • In cooperation with the Regensburg City Archive
  • Duration: 2011 -2013
  • Project contact: Elisabeth Steiner

For the final project of the first EuroMACHS year, the Regensburg City Archives were won as a partner. The holdings of the Regensburg coat of arms and portrait books located there were made accessible as a web representation and simultaneously archived for the long term. One of the 12 volumes could be realized as a digital edition, the remaining collection is available as facsimile.

To the project

National

  • Funding: CLARIAH-AT
  • Duration: 01.07.2026 - 30.09.2026
  • PI: Sabrina Strutz

The digital edition of the correspondence of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) comprises around 3,000 letters encoded in TEI/XML, published in the Humanities Asset Management System (GAMS) at the University of Graz. Mentions of persons within the letters are partially marked up with <persName> tags, but are not linked to authority data (GND) – a gap that limits the possibility of machine-based analysis and the reusability of the edition as a research resource.

The project tests a semi-automated, LLM-supported workflow for person identification and authority control in three steps: (1) normalisation of existing <persName> tags by resolving abbreviations and merging split name components, (2) detection of previously unmarked person mentions using prompt-based Named Entity Recognition, and (3) automated matching with the project’s internal person index and the GND via the lobid API, complemented by human quality control in cases of uncertain assignments. Particular challenges include inconsistent spellings, abbreviations, missing first names, and multilinguality (including German, French, Arabic).

The outcome will be an expanded, GND-linked person index for the Hammer-Purgstall corpus, as well as a documented, reproducible workflow serving as a proof of concept for comparable historical correspondences. The project enhances the availability of Austrian metadata in European aggregators such as CorrespSearch, provides a reusable contribution for the DH community, and advances the current discussion on the use of generative AI in digital scholarly editions.

  • In cooperation with: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Danube University Krems, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austrian National Library, Paris Lodron University Salzburg, University of Graz (project coordination), University of Innsbruck, University of Vienna, Vienna University of Technology
  • Funding: BMBWF "(Digital) Research Infrastructure"
  • Duration: 01.01.2023-30.06.2026
  • Project contact: Florian Atzenhofer-Baumgartner, Georg Vogeler

DHInfra.at is building an infrastructure for digitally supported research in the Austrian humanities. It fills the gap between standard offerings in cultural heritage institutions (digitization), in research data management (curated and integrated repositories vs. institutional repositories), in software solutions (subject-specific open source products), and HPC offerings for the natural, technical and life sciences in the processing of large amounts of data with machine learning. Equipment for digitization (scanning robots, multispectral cameras) and storage (Ceph) for repositories for data from the cultural heritage institutions as well as GPU clusters for research with and productive use of machine learning methods are procured and implemented. Open source software is adapted and further developed to meet the specific needs of the community. The existing CLARIAH-AT consortium facilitates governance and long-term maintenance of the infrastructure.

The Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall Correspondence is dedicated to the realization of the correspondence of the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) as a digital edition. The correspondence is an impressive testament to his extensive scholarly exchange and his central role in Oriental studies. It extends across all of Europe to the USA and India and represents an irreplaceable source for the history of this discipline.
Based on the letters published in 2018 in five volumes, both in print and as PDF versions, a digital edition is currently being created, which is being implemented and published in the Humanities Asset Management System (GAMS) at the University of Graz. In a first step, the already published volumes are currently being converted into a TEI/XML edition and, in the course of this, enriched with standardized metadata and authority data.
The new platform offers the possibility to cite and persistently reference each individual letter; the data are published under a Creative Commons BY-NC license. The objectives include the enrichment and augmentation with metadata and authority data, the conception and trial implementation of a workflow for additional letters, as well as the publication and archiving in a certified repository with onward delivery to national and international aggregators.

In connection with the institute’s long-standing expertise in the scholarly digitisation of archival collections, a data model and a mapping to Europeana interfaces were developed in a joint workshop at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute as part of a project funded by the BMKÖS.

10th conference in the "Digital Library" conference series, organized by our institute, the University Library of Graz, and EuropeanaLocal Austria.
Siehe: https://conference.ait.co.at/digbib/index.php/digbib2024/digbib2024

  • Funded by: CLARIAH-AT
  • Duration: 18.10.2024 - 13.01.2026
  • PI: Lucija Brozic

This project aims to create an emotion-annotated corpus for historical Austrian German in order to fine-tune existing machine learning models for sentiment analysis (SA), which involves the automatic detection of emotions and opinions in texts (Liu, 2012). Currently, there is a significant gap in sentiment corpora needed for fine-tuning machine learning models, such as Schweter (2020), which was trained on non-annotated historical newspapers.

The project will help to bridge this gap by annotating a newspaper corpus from ANNO (Austrian National Library, 2021) and DIGITARIUM (Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2017), covering the period from 1800 to 1938 and including titles such as Wienerisches Diarium, Der Wanderer, Das Vaterland, Neue Freie Presse, Arbeiter Zeitung, and Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung. It will enable detailed SA that uncovers narratives about migrants and minorities and allows comparisons between different political orientations in newspapers.

  • Funded by: FFG - Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft - Austrian Research Promotion Agency
  • Duration: 30.11.2023 - 31.12.2025
  • PI: Martina Scholger
  • Project collaborator: Georg Vogeler

Many approaches in the Digital Humanities, can benefit from modern machine learning (ML) methods. Especially, large language models (LLMs) and other neural architectures specialized to texts are tools that can potentially transform the scientific processes in these fields. Simultaneously, humanities put new problems to research in ML and with LLMs.
The Know-Center and the Centre for Information Modeling (ZIM) will collaborate to study the potential, capabilities, and limitations of ML methods and LLMs within the wider field of Digital Humanities in general, for instance in the study of Spectatorial periodicals, in information extraction from historical administrative records, or historical network research, continuing joint work that has started in the Distant Reading for Periodicals of the Enlightenment (DiSpecs) project.

Expected Results:
1.    Joint publication of a conference proceeding on the topic of ML in digital scholarly editions and further scientific publications
2.    Jointly supervised Master’s and PhD theses
3.    Training in ML methods for digital scholarly editing
4.    Improved understanding of the applicability of ML and LLMs within text- and data analysis in humanities research

The interdisciplinary and international research project, a collaboration between the University of Tübingen, University of Wuppertal, University of Graz, University College London, Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, brings together the fields of art history, Latin philology, medieval history, edition studies and digital humanities. The aims are (1) a comprehensive overview of the tradition of Peter of Poitiers' Compendium historiae in genealogia christi, (2) an analysis of the graphic metastructure as well as the texts, diagrams and images embedded in it (and the recording of variants), (3) a digital critical scholarly edition (based on selected witnesses), and (4) an exploration of relevant contexts. With the development of the digital edition, new methodological ground is being broken in terms of the adequate representation of diagrammatic works through a formalised and navigable knowledge graph that represents the variants of the work as individual forms of realisation and transmission through innovative visualisation technologies. The project will make accessible one of the most visually innovative and influential works of the Middle Ages and shed new light on the history of the visualisation of knowledge. It will also provide a model with which works of complex graphic structure can be edited and made accessible in the future.

  • In cooperation with the Center for the History of Science
  • Funded by: CLARIAH-AT, internal project
  • Duration: 2024-2025
  • Project contact: martina.scholger(at)uni-graz.at

The Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall Correspondence is dedicated to implementing the correspondence of Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856) as a digital edition. The correspondence is an impressive testament to his far-reaching scholarly dialogue and his central role in Oriental studies. It extends across Europe to the USA and India and represents an irreplaceable source for the history of Oriental studies. Based on the letters published in 2018 in five volumes in both printed and PDF format, a digital edition based on the Text Encoding Initiative standard is being created here, which is continuously expanded with new letters.

The making of the incredibly differentiated labor market in Austria

We describe the emergence of and the continuous change in the labor market in Austria over a time span of about 100 years from the mid of 19th to the mid of 20th century through the lens of job ads in newspapers. Job ads hold many qualitative information about the vacancy and the candidate which can be assessed using modern natural language processing tools. We document the emergence, development and differentiation of the Austrian labor market. Job ads are one of the means to overcome incomplete information in this market.

SISTE VIATOR - This can often be read on gravestones. But what does the inscription mean? Why is it in Latin? What period is it from? Who commissioned it and why? Who was supposed to read it?

Latin inscriptions, which can be found in large numbers from antiquity to the present day, usually raise many questions for those looking at them today. The language, script and abbreviations are puzzling and we lack the historical context. Nevertheless, we often stop to read what is written there. And whoever had SISTE VIATOR carved on a gravestone wanted exactly that: "Stand still, wanderer" commands the inscription. We are therefore asked to stop, take our time and enter into a conversation with the inscription.

The [LIDAL] project starts here and pursues three goals: (1) Whoever finds a Latin inscription is invited to report it to us (Citizen Science). We collect them in a database according to previously defined criteria. (2) The focus is on pupils from Austria and Germany working with us to prepare a representative selection of these inscriptions for school lessons (text, translation, details, questions/answers, etc.) and publish them on a web portal. Pupils should have a say in what is explained. The material is presented in such a way that 'inscription tours' - real and virtual - can be created, through which information can be obtained and skills deepened as you 'pass by'. This can be a tour of medieval inscriptions in Graz, but tours to consolidate grammar knowledge, learn vocabulary or gain new insights into world or local history are also conceivable - all individually on site or virtually 'walkable'. As an innovative tool for digital learning, the web portal can be used across subjects (Latin, history, religion, etc.) and, above all, for personal learning outside the classroom. The students will also have the opportunity to present and discuss their results at an international student congress. Finally (3), scientific studies, e.g. on the use of inscriptions in the classroom, on interdisciplinary and cross-border learning or on digitalization, will provide new insights. There are also plans to create a version of LIDAL with the support of the students that runs on cell phones and can also be used for tourism.

  • In cooperation with the ÖAW
  • Funded by: FWF
  • Duration: 2022-2025
  • Project contact: Georg Vogeler, Selina Galka

The memoirs of Countess Schwerin, written around 1724, are a unique source on the cultural and gender history of two of the most important European courts, namely the imperial court in Vienna and the Prussian royal court in Berlin. They have survived in two non-identical copies, one of which is in Aix-en-Provence and the other in Vienna. Geographically, the life story told in the text extends from the Dutch lands to Poland, Warmia and Silesia, but focuses on the courts of Berlin and Vienna. The text is remarkably dense and multi-layered and provides rare insights into female court networks and lifeworlds. The aim of the project is to create a digital edition that combines the unique source with epistemologically motivated research. The user interface will make it possible to compare different text variants with the facsimiles. The texts will be processed using modern digital technologies and enriched with standard data; in addition, the extensive scholarly commentary will be organized as a flexible database. The visualization of the social networks extracted from the texts is central to the project. The digital indexing of the texts also makes it possible to apply a wide range of computer-aided text analysis methods, such as topic modeling.

The project develops a digital genetic edition of Werner Kofler's prose "Am Schreibtisch" and explores the auditory and aural components of the writing process.

  • Supported by: FWF
  • Duration: 01.03.2020 - 31.08.2025
  • PI: Georg Vogeler

BeCore is a comparative study of the textual and graphic signs of authority and authentication in medieval charters. It builds on the resources of Monasterium (http://monasterium.net/mom/home), a portal for the publication and edition of more than 600,000 charters from across Europe, about 270,000 of which are linked to images of the original documents. The project will integrate new corpora into Monasterium and implement tools for semi-automatic indexing and searching in images of handwritten texts as well as in graphic and ornamental signs. These tools are based on the results of earlier projects that are currently in their final phase (projects ORIFLAMMS, ANR-12-CORP-0010, and HIMANIS, European project Heritage Plus, FWF “Illuminated Charters”). This will make it possible to study the signs of power and authority along several lines of inquiry: the signs themselves, the dissemination of models, and the relations between graphic and textual signs.

The memoirs of the countess Schwerin were written around 1724 and have survived in two non-identical copies, one found in Aix-en-Provence and one in Vienna. Geographically, the life story narrated in the text stretches from the Dutch countryside to Poland, Warmia, and Silesia, but is centred at the courts of Berlin and Vienna. The text is remarkably dense and multifaceted and allows rare insights into female court networks and “Lebenswelten”. The proposed project aims to combine a scholarly digital edition of this unique source with epistemically motivated research.

  • Supported by: FWF
  • Duration: 01.08.2020 - 28.02.2025
  • PI: Georg Vogeler

Illuminated charters – that is, written legal instruments containing elements of artistic design – have gained increasing scholarly attention in recent years. Building on the experience of two previous interdisciplinary projects, the applicant intends to investigate the development of French illuminated documents in the Middle Ages, with a particular focus on the production under Charles V and Charles VI.

During a three‑month research stay in Paris funded by the German Forum for Art History, around 900 decorated charters were collected. The aim is to use this material to present a preliminary history of the French illuminated document in the database monasterium.net. Each document will be accompanied by an art‑historical description and classification. A glossary already developed for collective indulgences and adapted for this purpose (https://www.monasterium.net/mom/index/IllUrkGlossar) will be used to explain questions that go beyond mere recording.

In addition to the positivistic collection of material, the project seeks to explore the various reasons why effort was invested in decorating a legal text. This includes questions of public outreach and awareness, the relationship between the social status of issuer/producer/recipient, artistic issues such as why colour plays such a limited role in French charters and grisaille is employed as a deliberate means of expression, and questions of patronage, especially in the reign of Charles V, which will form an important part of the investigation.

Taken as a whole, the project will shed new light on the social, political, and cultural aims embedded in French illuminated charters. The study of these documents can substantially enhance our knowledge not only of art history, but also of medieval history, palaeography, heraldry, and diplomatics. Since no synthetic publications on this topic currently exist, the very presentation of the material is in itself innovative. The digital tools provided by monasterium.net will make it possible to compare developments in France with those in other European countries – something that is not yet feasible today.

Although primarily an art‑historical project, an interdisciplinary approach is nevertheless essential. A digital humanist will be responsible for the appropriate presentation of metadata and for adapting a virtual research environment, including the expansion of the associated glossary in monasterium.net. A diplomatics specialist will provide the regesta (short scholarly summaries of the contents). As an art historian, the applicant has been part of the team at the Austrian Academy of Sciences since the inception of research on illuminated documents in October 2014, working primarily on collective indulgences from Avignon. Her scholarly work has focused on French manuscript illumination around 1400. Her research interests include Christian iconography, the investigation of relationships between manuscript production and their impact on book illumination, as well as questions of stylistic history.

As part of the long-standing collaboration on the scholarly digitization of archival collections with the Diocesan Archive Graz-Seckau, a project funded by BMKÖS at DAGS drew on our expertise in the Europeana Data Model. In joint workshops, we developed a data model and created a mapping to Europeana interfaces.

Work carried out within the FWF project P 29274‑G25: “The Celtic Theonyms in the Inscriptions of the Roman Province Germania Inferior. A Case Study of Religion in the Context of Cultural Contact and Cultural Transfer” has shown that a continuation of this undertaking, with an extension of the area of investigation to the neighbouring northern part of Upper Germany and thus an enlargement of the material base, is highly desirable. In the project now being proposed, the general aims and research questions remain essentially the same, but they will certainly lead to more in‑depth as well as additional new insights.

The following results are, in the opinion of the applicant, expected to constitute a significant advancement of the current state of knowledge:

  1. An up‑to‑date edition of all relevant inscriptional material, made available online in the new digital format developed in project P 29274‑G25.
  2. A detailed, comprehensive presentation of all Celtic‑language theonyms in the area under investigation, which does not yet exist and which represents an indispensable basis for all related studies.
  3. Verification, deepening, and expansion of the results obtained from the evaluation and analysis of the Celtic theonyms from the province of Germania Inferior. This includes in particular the following complexes of questions:
    • Forms and development of cults in zones of cultural contact,
    • History‑of‑mentality aspects of religion in zones of cultural contact,
    • Socio‑historical aspects of religion in zones of cultural contact,
    • Political aspects of religion in zones of cultural contact,
    • The spread of the Celtic language after Roman occupation.

The extension of the previous area of investigation, “Germania Inferior”, to the military zone around Mainz and to the territories of the Treveri, Vangiones, Nemetes, and Triboci practically suggests itself: on the one hand because these regions are geographically adjacent, and on the other hand because their demographic conditions are similar to those in the earlier area of investigation – and, in the case of the Treveran territory, in part also different in significant ways.

The restriction to Celtic theonyms is explained pragmatically by the fact that the proposed project continues an already initiated enterprise with this thematic focus, by the need to circumscribe the scope of the research in general, but above all by the circumstance that Celtic theonyms in Latin inscriptions constitute a rich field of enquiry for questions relating to religion in zones of cultural contact.

The proposed project is closely linked to the international research network F.E.R.C.AN., whose aim is to compile and analyse all Celtic‑language theonyms attested in Roman inscriptions.

As a sub-project of "Kulturerbe Digital", the work manuscripts and photo collections from the Hugo Schuchardt estate were digitized and published as the last outstanding parts. The manuscripts from Hugo Schuchardt's estate, which are held in the special collections of Graz University Library, comprise a large amount of diverse material. This material includes handwritten and printed documents such as notebooks, notes, galley proofs, drafts, photographs and newspaper cuttings. The collections mainly contain photographs (some taken by Hugo Schuchardt himself on his travels) and some postcards. The metadata is delivered to Kulturpool.at and Europeana.eu.

To the Hugo Schuchardt Archive

The imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire is one of the most important symbols of European history. Today it belongs to the collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) in Vienna. As part of the CROWN project initiated by the KHM, a comprehensive analysis of the imperial crown is being carried out. The cooperation partner is the Center for Information Modelling at the University of Graz.

The aim of the analysis of the Imperial Crown is to determine the conservation status of the object and to advance the discussion about the context in which the object was created. To this end, all components of the crown (plates, frontal cross, brackets, gemstones, decorative elements, etc.) are analyzed from a scientific, conservation and (art) historical perspective.

EXAMPLE

A "high setting for pearl with pins" is a component on a plate of the Imperial Crown. This is a 30 x 30 x 20 mm gold setting. Five points on this setting are each examined using three analysis methods: 3D microscopy, X-ray fluorescence analysis (XRF) and multispectral imaging (MSI).

Each analysis includes a description of the measurement process, tabular measurement data and results in the form of diagrams, as well as a (con)textual interpretation of the measurement by the specialist scientists.

WORKFLOW

The description, analysis results and links between the individual components of the Imperial Crown and secondary sources are research data. These are recorded in The Museum System (TMS). The following steps are necessary to FAIRify this collection data as a Linked Open Data resource:

  • Requirements analysis and modeling using existing models (CIDOC-CRM, CRMsci, BFO, Linked Art).
  • Normalization via controlled vocabularies (Getty, GND etc.) and public knowledge graphs (DBpedia, Wikidata)
  • Transformation & mapping of the CSV export from TMS with Python (RDFlib)
  • Semantic enrichment through reconciliation and automated keywording of free text fields.
  • Publication & long-term archiving via the Humanities Asset Management System (GAMS) with requirement-specific front end.

 

BEST PRACTICES

All collection areas of the KHM enter their data in TMS. In addition to the "classic" data fields for object description, specific research questions are also pursued. In the case of the Imperial Crown, for example, these are the analysis methods and their interpretation. Mapping to linked open data vocabularies alone is not sufficient to meet the requirements.

Accordingly, it is necessary to develop a best-practice workflow that makes it possible to convert more complex issues from a TMS system into reusable research data. The development of these best practices will be funded by CLARIAH-AT in 2023.

Project contact: Christopher Pollin, christopher.pollin(at)uni-graz.at

At the beginning of 2021, the "KONDE White Paper Digital Edition" was published. The white paper contains over 200 contributions written by authors from seven Austrian universities and three additional institutions. The aim of the present project is to issue a further call for submissions to the KONDE White Paper in order to broaden the thematic scope, but also to improve and update existing articles. To this end, a public call for submissions will be published, addressed to the German‑speaking editorial community.

As part of the DiTAH project (Digitale Transformation der österreichischen Geisteswissenschaften – Digital Transformation of the Austrian Humanities), funded by the BMBWF (Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research), a Virtual Museum of the Archaeological Collections of the University of Graz is being developed at the Institute of Classics, in cooperation with the Centre for Information Modelling / ZIM.

The aim of the project is the prototypical implementation of a Virtual Museum. This will be carried out in four steps:

  1. digitization of the collection rooms in the university’s main building, which are protected as a heritage ensemble;
  2. documentation of the plaster casts through high-resolution 3D models;
  3. compilation of relevant data on the acquisition history of the plaster casts, with a focus on acquisitions prior to 1900, and their integration into a database; and
  4. creation of a modular structure for a Virtual Museum, in which objects and rooms can be made accessible online.

The work will be carried out with the direct involvement of students and accompanied by specialized courses taught at the Institute of Classics (M. Christidis, M. Lehner) and at the Centre for Information Modelling (Ch. Zuanni).

Project video on YouTube: Cast Collection of the University of Graz

 

  • Funded by: FWF
  • Duration: 05.10.2019 - 04.10.2023
  • PI: Klaus Kastberger
  • Project contact: Hans Clausen
  • Project collaborator: Johannes Stigler

In cooperation with the Franz Nabl Institute, this project is developing a digital edition of Horváth's dram as. In addition to the edition of the drama texts themselves, their quantitative research and presentation, including in the form of figure networks, is at the center of the editorial work.

The project Philingk: Networked Knowledge on the Subject History of (Romance) Philology and Linguistics is a cooperation between the Department of Digital Humanities of the University of Graz, the Department of Linguistics of the University of Graz and the Romance Department of the University of Zurich. It deals with the correspondence between Gaston Paris and Hugo Schuchardt (185 letters) and its significance in the history of (Romance) philology and linguistics. The two correspondents, although almost the same age and academically socialized in comparable contexts, took very different paths and engaged in an extremely fruitful epistolary discourse until Paris' death. The correspondence will be edited both analog and digitally (hybrid edition), integrated into the existing digital Hugo Schuchardt Archive, annotated and indexed, and integrated into the CorrespSearch aggregation server of the BBAW (Berlin). The aim is to virtually represent this central component of a discourse network that existed in the later 19th century, to make it publicly accessible (open access) and to make it available for new research questions.

  • Funded by: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften und Gesellschaft für sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Balkanforschung (CSBSC)
  • Duration: 15.04.2022 - 31.05.2023
  • PI: Martina Scholger
  • Project collaborator: Georg Vogeler

The project creates and maintains a digital archive of visual material from history and contemporary South-Eastern Europe (VASE).
To the project

The aim of this project is to establish and prepare the methods and approaches developed in the Digital Humanities in such a way that they can become part of the everyday practice of humanities research and early-career training. To this end, jointly developed solutions will be created in three major thematic areas: the integration of digital infrastructure, the preparation and low-threshold access to digital methods and tools, and the promotion of digital skills in research and teaching. The implementing consortium is made up of members from all major Austrian Digital Humanities institutions.

 

In this workshop, students are introduced to the theoretical foundations of digital image processing and machine learning that are necessary for computer vision, using tools that are available in the context of the Digital Humanities, such as the Distant Viewing Toolkit (a Python package). This course bridges the gap between students with a humanities background (without prior training in computer science or statistics) and existing computer vision training materials, which are usually aimed at users who already have a strong understanding of basic computer science and mathematical principles.

A particular concern within DH is to explain how these very technical methods can be meaningfully applied in the context of humanities research questions and which domain-specific tools and software already exist for such purposes. The intended learning outcomes are:

  • to contextualize digital imaging and imaging techniques within the field of Digital Humanities;
  • to gain basic knowledge of how computer vision and machine learning work;
  • to become familiar with the tools available for computer vision in the Digital Humanities;
  • to understand how to adapt existing workflows for application to one’s own data.

The workshop itself is structured into six individual sessions of about three hours each, held over three days:

  • Introduction to computer vision used in DH (project showcase of possibilities; fundamentals)
  • Digital image representation: how images are digitized; understanding the manipulation of digital images using the example of multispectral photography; how images are represented digitally (raster graphics, vectors, IIIF)
  • Tools: working with existing software (e.g. tools from the Oxford Visual Geometry Group)
  • Fundamentals of computer vision and machine learning required to understand “advanced topics” such as clustering, image classification, etc.
  • Working with the Distant Viewing Toolkit (Python package), adapting it to one’s own data
  • Fine-tuning existing models (trained on ImageNet) for one’s own historical data

This project will produce three teaching videos as well as a set of slide decks and Jupyter notebooks that contain the practical exercises based on this workshop – all of which will be shared on relevant platforms such as DARIAH Campus.

The aim of this project is to develop teaching materials that convey fundamental skills at the intersection of Digital Humanities and Book Studies. Students will gain an understanding of the basics of digitization processes, as well as how early printed books and manuscripts are described according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines (including the msDescription and transcription modules). The project includes a winter school and the creation of teaching materials.

The aim of the project is to produce best-practice guidelines and tutorials for transitions between selected tools, as well as training materials in the context of implementing digital editions. These tutorials and guidelines will be developed as an extension of the "KONDE White Paper". This will ensure that future edition projects can plan their individual workflows easily and efficiently. Shared tools can thus be evaluated and improved with regard to their requirements and their interaction with other tools.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Philosophy of Law and the Medical University of Graz
  • Duration: 2009 - 2022
  • Project contact: Walter Scholger

In the project contexts of the Department, one is repeatedly confronted with legal questions, especially with regard to the handling of copyright in digital sources. In cooperation with Elisabeth Staudegger from the Department of Philosophy of Law, Sociology of Law and Legal Informatics and Reinhard Staber from the Medical University of Graz, the efforts are now culminating in the preparation of a ministerial draft by the Forum Neue Medien in der Lehre Austria to amend the relevant legal situation in Austria.

The aim of this project is to develop a tool chain for sentiment analysis that can be applied to multilingual text corpora from the 18th century. With a focus on lexicon-based sentiment analysis, the first step is the annotation of 18th-century texts with regard to their polarity, i.e. the extent to which individual words in the text are perceived as positive or negative. This annotation, produced by experts in Romance studies, forms the basis for creating new sentiment lexicons or expanding existing ones in the respective languages. The resulting lexicons are then used in sentiment-analysis tool chains that correspond to the state of the art in natural language processing, but have so far not been transferred to the field of digital humanities. An exemplary use case involving a multilingual 18th-century corpus, together with documentation, is intended to facilitate the development of future tool chains for other projects. In addition to making the tool available, a three-day workshop will be offered.

With this application to the Hertha Firnberg Programme, I seek funding for my research on the visual representation of Yugoslav labour migrants in Austria, based on the photographic legacy of the Yugoslav photographer Jovan Ritopečki (1923–1989). Austria in the 1970s and 1980s forms the regional focus, with a transnational connection to the former Yugoslavia.
Through the first scholarly analysis of this photographic legacy, the project will examine how Yugoslav labour migration is visualized in Jovan Ritopečki’s photographs and how these images were shaped by contemporary social contexts and their modes of use. The photographs will be explored as a source of new insights into social and everyday history in the context of Yugoslav labour migration.
Another aim is to make new visual sources accessible to researchers and the wider public. The digitization and public presentation of a representative selection of images from Ritopečki’s photographic legacy in the virtual Visual Archive South Eastern Europe (VASE – gams.uni-graz.at/context:vase) constitute an integral part of the project.

The aim is to annotate and publish the 24 radio plays, the play and the film script of this aesthetically highly reflexive author. Volume IV of the edition will contain the primary texts and the commentaries. The commentary will also be published online. In this way, this important aesthetic position within Austrian literature will be made visible in the entire spectrum of its writing styles and a hybrid edition will be offered that is characterized by practicability, manageability and a high user factor, thus satisfying not only the needs of literary studies but also those of an interested readership. A further aim is to explore the possibilities of the Internet as a medium for the publication of scholarly editions of radio plays. In addition, work is being done on a research platform to explore intermedial phenomena.

About the project

The cooperation focuses on consultancy and technical support within the FWF project “Correspondence A. Schönberg–Universal Edition. Hybrid Edition” (FWF project no. P 33576-G, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna), as well as on the technical infrastructure of the Arnold Schönberg Center. The aim of the cooperation is to establish an editorial workflow using the Ediarum software and to prepare a decision on the technical further development of the Schönberg Center’s repository.

The planned project aims to present aspects of medieval culinary culture and methods of the digital humanities to a predominantly young target group with little affinity to universities. These people, who are not among the primary target audience of science communication, are to be given insight into the work of researchers at a university and introduced to selected content from the humanities. For such an audience, the direct communication of research is not the most suitable approach. Therefore, science is combined with an everyday topic that is thematically unrelated and still socially controversial, in order to spark the interest of the target group through this access point. The project’s main product will be a series-style sequence of video clips in the format of a docu-soap (“Science Ink”), set in a tattoo studio. In this environment, the tattoo artist and the researcher talk about their work and can thus incorporate in-depth explanations on various topics. In producing the clips, specific interests of the target group, current video and YouTube trends, explainer-video methods, and principles of science communication are combined. Scientific content enters the conversation via visual inserts and overlays, which also introduce other locations (e.g. office, classroom, kitchen). Within this narrative framework, the videos convey scholarly content on medieval nutrition, cooking instructions for historical dishes, research approaches from the digital humanities, and of course information about tattooing. By pairing science with this topic, the scholarly themes are placed at the center of the target group’s interest and the visibility of the clips in digital publication media is enhanced—first by making them discoverable, then by making them appealing. The videos will be published primarily on YouTube and, in order to actively reach the core target group, presented in a youth center. As derivatives, the video clips will be edited into smaller units (e.g. explainer videos, cooking videos), which will then be used in established contexts and disseminated via familiar channels, making them available to the more traditional target groups (science-affine audiences). In addition, essay-style summaries of the scholarly content and didactic modules for teaching these contents in schools will be offered. The video clips will always be accompanied by an interactive website that enables playful exploration of the project’s topics, ensuring immediate opportunities for interaction with the content. For a hands-on approach, a cooking course will be designed at the Open Lab of the University of Graz, where the recipes from the videos can be prepared under scientific guidance.

  • Supported by: Internal project
  • Duration: 2019-2021
  • Project contact: Jakob Sonnberger

The digital edition of transcripts of England's last public mass oath-taking was created as part of a master's thesis.

  • Supported by: Zukunftsfonds Steiermark / Republic of Austria
  • Duration: 2019-2021
  • Project contact: Sebastian Stoff

The project, initiated under the direction of the Center for Jewish Studies with cooperation partners (Center for Information Modeling, Didactics of History and _erinnern.at_), pursues the goal of georeferenced indexing of places of remembrance of the terror and victims of National Socialism, initially for the territory of Styria, but in the future for the whole of Austria. The aim is to go beyond a mere online documentation of the places of remembrance manifested by signs and to develop new forms of presentation and new perspectives of digitally mediated remembrance education in an interdisciplinary team.

  • Funded by: Center for Cultural Studies
  • Duration: 2021
  • Project contact: Martina Scholger

The digital anthology "Twilight Zones" provides a new text compilation of "liminal texts" and their analysis through a comprehensive category system that offers innovative insights into the long period of the turn of the century in France, Austria and Germany. The project was implemented in cooperation with the Center for Cultural Studies, the Department of Sociology and the Department of Digital Humanities.

  • Duration: 2016-2021
  • Project contact: Georg Vogeler

Hermann Grotefend (1845-1931) created a standard work for the resolution of historical dates with his "Zeitrechnung des deutschen Mittelalters und der Neuzeit". At the beginning of the 21st century, Dr. Horst Ruth retro-digitized this work with the index of saints and the calendars. This retro-digitization serves as the basis for this project, with the aim of modeling the data for the Semantic Web as Linked Open Data. RDF helps to prepare this information in such a way that it can be exchanged between systems while retaining its original meaning. Content statements are expressed via 'triples', for which the use of Linked Open Data vocabularies is preferred. The database can also be easily expanded to include the RDF representation of historically documented calendars. In addition, SPARQL is a query language that offers more potential than conventional full-text searches.

  • in cooperation with the Literature Archive of the University of Salzburg
  • Duration: 15.12.2016-15.12.2021
  • Project contact: Christopher Pollin

The aim of the project is to bring together Stefan Zweig's estate, which is scattered around the world, in the digital space and to make it accessible to an audience interested in literary studies and academia. In cooperation with the Literature Archive of the University of Salzburg, a digital reconstruction of the estate will be generated based on the source material available there. The result is a structured collection of digital objects that is represented in terms of digital long-term archiving and is accessible to users regardless of time and place. The project is designed in such a way that it will be possible to index and enrich the source material (e.g. digital editions) at a later date.

  • In cooperation with the University of Salzburg
  • Funded by: FWF
  • Duration: 15.08.2017-14.12.2021
  • Project contact: Carina Koch und Georg Vogeler

The FWF-funded project on the mediality of diplomatic communication examines the correspondence between Habsburg envoys in Constantinople and the imperial court in Vienna. The main sources are letters by the diplomat Johann Rudolf Schmid zum Schwarzenhorn (1590-1667), including the correspondence of other residents in Constantinople, and the travel diary of Johann Georg Metzger († 1697), which contains not only daily events but also natural history and ethnographic information, as well as maps and sketches. The text sources are digitally edited and compared and analyzed using digital tools. Rules of correspondence, individual representations and the relationship between author and recipient are a focal point for the examination of the letters. Personal impressions and descriptions of events will also be examined more closely in the previously unpublished travelogue. The Department is developing the necessary data model and visualization options.

  • Funded by: ÖAW (go!digital Next Generation)
  • Duration: 01.06.2019-31.08.2021
  • PI: Leif Scheuermann, 
  • Project collaborator: Carina Koch
  • Project contact: Martina Bürgermeister

Graz grew enormously over the course of the long 19th century (1789-1914). The project, which is being implemented together with the GrazMuseum and the Graz City Archives, deals with the development of the city of Graz during this period. With the help of a geographic information system (GIS), the changes in the city, the process of urbanization and the perception of it over the course of time will be analysed. City maps of Graz are combined with descriptions (e.g. from travel guides) and pictorial sources (e.g. postcards) from the 19th century with the current state of research. In this way, the "BeUrb" project provides a basis for the analysis of urban development in a period that can be strongly characterized by radical and rapid change.

The GIS is a tool for identifying places and structures that have significantly influenced urban development in the past and continue to do so today. The project therefore not only provides an insight into and overview of historical developments and events, but also creates a better understanding of Graz as we know it today. In addition to the benefits and added value of the project for research and teaching, the web-based project content will also be available for private and tourist use.

The ZIM-ACDH institute is responsible for the data modeling of the primary sources, the technical implementation of the GIS and the web presentation.

  • Funded by: ÖAW | go!digital Next Generation
  • Duration: 01.06.2019 - 31.05.2021
  • Project contact: Sebastian Stoff

NAMPI will create a semantic RDF database supported by the factoid model ontology developed by Pasin & Bradley, which, together with additional content-oriented ontologies, will provide an accurate representation of the lives of early modern nuns and monks. This data will be made available to researchers and reused by other projects through a modern and well-documented REST API and a website based on the API.

The journalistic genre of the Spectators (moral weeklies) of the 18th century represents an important world cultural heritage from the Age of Enlightenment. The journals corresponded to the democratic ideal of disseminating cultural and moral issues in non-academic circles and popularizing Enlightenment values such as cosmopolitanism, tolerance, intellectual criticism, self-reflection and social responsibility. Based on the existing text corpus of the digital edition of the Spectators, this cooperation between the Department for Interactive Systems and Data Science at Graz University of Technology, the Know-Center Graz, the Department of Digital Humanities and the Department for Romance Studies at the University of Graz aims to examine this multilingual corpus using computer-aided methods of quantitative text analysis. This will provide insights into the shifting of topics over time and geographical distance, as well as stylistic features, which will subsequently enable the formulation of statements about trends and zeitgeist in the periodicals of the 18th century. An important focus is on the transnational transfer and development of this literary genre, taking into account geographical, cultural and temporal characteristics.

About the project

  • In cooperation with: Universität Klagenfurt, Adalbert-Stifter-Institut Land Oberösterreich, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Kunstuniversität Graz, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg, Universität Graz (Projektkoordination), Universität Innsbruck, Universität Wien
  • Duration: 01.03.2017-31.03.2021
  • PI: Johannes Stigler

The FWF-Project P26706-G21 „Illuminated Charters“ studies a set of about 2000 historical documents at a crossroad of different established humanities disciplines and data practice: documents are studied in the field of archival sciences and diplomatics. Illuminations are studied by art historians. All three have developed methods of documentation and data representation that overlap only partially . The monasterium.net platform is the working environment for the project and made possible to integrate the different methods in a common platform. But still monasterium.net is a domain specific service focusing on medieval charters.
In contrast, the leading Austrian humanities data repository GAMS at the ZIM-ACDH in Graz3 is a FEDORA Commons based repository including several services (e.g. RDF representation of documents, IIIF based image server, generic TEI methods) for providing a long term storage and open data orientation. The project aims at archiving and publishing the research data of the project in this repository to make it available in a long term perspective and foster data exchange. It poses several challenges of general interest: (a) Conversion of the data from domain specific standards (CEI) into generic humanities standard (TEI). (b) Integrating the data capture tools of monasterium.net (web based XML Editor, Image Annotation Tools) into a workflow with repository storage at the end. (c) Definition of RDF based ontologies and generic APIs representing the logics of the descriptive taxonomy. (d) Handling distributed image repositories.
Processing the research data in an ORD project would be a pilot attempt for the conversion of the whole domain specific data stored in monasterium.net as well as a test case for the integration of external data capture infrastructure into the GAMS architecture.

The aim of this project is to develop a tool chain for sentiment analysis that can be applied to multilingual text corpora from the 18th century. Focusing on lexicon-based sentiment analysis, the first step is the annotation of 18th-century texts with regard to polarity, i.e. the degree to which individual words in the text are perceived as positive or negative. This annotation, carried out by experts in Romance studies, forms the basis for creating new sentiment lexicons or extending existing ones in the respective languages.
The resulting lexicons will then be integrated into sentiment-analysis tool chains that correspond to the current state of the art in natural language processing, but have so far not been transferred to the field of digital humanities. An exemplary use case with a multilingual 18th-century corpus, together with comprehensive documentation, is intended to facilitate the creation of future tool chains for other projects. In addition to developing these tools, a three-day workshop will be offered.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Romance Studies
  • Funded by: FWF, Open Research Data
  • Duration: 2017-2020
  • Project contact: Gerlinde Schneider and Christopher Pollin

The project aims to provide open access to a series of corpora compiled by the "Research Group on the Interfaces of Adjective and Adverb in Romance" at the University of Graz. The collected corpora will be updated for this purpose and integrated into a general database. In order to ensure maximum continuity and compatibility, the database will follow several relevant standards defined and promoted by the European Research Infrastructure Consortium for Language Resources CLARIN ERIC2. The following aspects are crucial for the project: open access, adaptation to international standards, development of standards for adjective-adverb tagging and the linking of the data with other language resources via Linked Data.

  • Funded by: FWF, Higher Education Area Structural Funds
  • Duration: 2017-2020
  • Project contact: Elisabeth Steiner

The project evaluates all Celtic god names preserved on inscriptions in the Roman province of Germania Inferior. This should lead to fundamental insights into the development and manifestations of the so-called Gallo-Roman provincial religion. It will also make an important contribution to the study of the processes commonly referred to as Romanization. In addition to a print edition, an online corpus of the inscriptions will also be created, which will be implemented by the ZIM.

  • Funded by: FWF
  • Duration: 2019 - 2020
  • Project contact: Helmut Klug

In the planned project , aspects of medieval cuisine and methods of digital humanities are to be prepared for a predominantly young, less university-affine target group. These people, who do not belong to the primary target group of science communication, are to be introduced to the work of scientists at a university and individual contents of the humanities. With such a target audience, the direct communication of research is not the right approach. Therefore, science is combined with a thematically unrelated everyday topic that is still controversial in society in order to reach the target group through this approach. The main product planned for the project is a series-like sequence of video clips in the style of a docu-soap ("Science Ink") with a tattoo studio as the setting. In this environment, the tattoo artist and the scientist talk about their work. In the production of the film clips, special interests of the target group, current video and YouTube trends, explanatory video methods and aspects of science communication are combined; science flows into the conversation via "inserts" in which other locations (e.g. office, classroom, kitchen) are introduced. In this framework story, scientific content on medieval nutrition, cooking instructions for historical dishes and research approaches of the digital humanities and, of course, information on tattooing are conveyed.

  • Supported by: Internal project
  • Duration: 2018-2019
  • Project contact: Sanja Saric

The subject of the project "War and Media Change" is print media that have the Schmalkaldic War (1546-1547) or the First French Religious War (1562-1563) as a common subject of speech and speaking time. On these two events, Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. Gabriele Haug-Moritz has examined the bibliographic resources available digitally and in print for these two events and has also compiled a data collection of 551 prints for the Schmalkaldic War and 527 for the First French War of Religion. As part of the project, a TEI model and a web view of this data will be created.

  • Supported by: Faculty of Humanities of the University of Graz
  • Duration: 2018-2019
  • Project contact: Sean Winslow, Gerlinde Schneider

The aim of this FWF-funded project is to develop a database for the identification, cataloging and dating of Ethiopian bookbinding tools and binding decorations. The Madgwas database is intended to be an expandable resource that uses semantic technologies to establish and visualize relationships between a large number of tools and decorative patterns as well as individual manuscripts. Researchers should thus be able to classify the manuscripts chronologically. The project will take advantage of the increasing provision of digital facsimiles by international libraries via the interfaces of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), which, in addition to the use of an RDF data model and a triple store for data storage, will enable links to domain-specific web ontologies as well as other projects in Ethiopian studies or codicology.

The cooperation project with the Austrian Academy of Sciences follows on from the previous project of the same name and aims to enrich the corpus of "Illuminated Charters" made publicly accessible on the monasterium.net platform with personal history and art history data and make it researchable via complex search queries.

  • Supported by: Province of Styria
  • Duration: 2017-2019
  • Project contact: Helmut W. Klug

Regional nutrition, sustainable lifestyles and health prevention are of great importance for Styrians in the 21st century. However, this was also the case in the Middle Ages and early modern times: This topic not only played a central role in everyday historical life, but also in the specialist literature of the time. An impressive example of this is the manuscript Ms. 1609 from the Graz University Library from the late 15th century. In the 'Medieval Laboratory' project, precisely these topics are being investigated on the basis of Germanic-medievalist and digital humanities (digital edition) and scientific communication methods. Based on the contents of the late medieval manuscript, four course modules have been developed to impart knowledge and practical application in a way that is suitable for laypeople: Nutrition, Medicine, Sustainability, Mentality. These courses form a further hands-on laboratory for the humanities as part of the Open Laboratory at the University of Graz.

  • Funded by: FWF, Open Research Data
  • Duration: 2017-2019
  • Project contact: Georg Vogeler

The project is a continuation of the FWF project "Illuminated Charters as a Gesamtkunstwerk" (P 26.706), which ended in 2017. The collection of illuminated documents created there on the world's largest document platform "monasterium.net" is being transferred to a long-term archiving strategy as part of the FWF's Open Science Data project (ORD84). The project is now ensuring that the data on the illuminated documents is backed up in the trustworthy repository GAMS, which was developed by the Department of Digital Humanities and is geared towards long-term archiving.

  • in cooperation with Adalbert-Stifter-Institut des Landes Oberösterreich, Kunstuniversität Graz, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Technische Universität Graz, Universität Innsbruck, Universität Klagenfurt, Universität Salzburg, Universität Wien
  • Duration: 2017-2019
  • Project contact: Helmut Klug

The Higher Education Area Structural Funds project aims to establish a research infrastructure in the field of digital humanities. Under the leadership of the Center, the competencies of the top-class partner institutions are bundled into a content-related and strategic concept for the establishment of a national, digital infrastructure for edition projects in order to meet the changing requirements of modern, digitally supported research.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Classical Philology
  • Funded by: bmwfw - Sparkling Science funding series
  • Duration: 2017-2019
  • Project contact: Sarah Lang

The "Graz Repository of Ancient Fables" (GRaF) is a Sparkling Science project that is developing a scientific school edition of ancient fables with the active participation of school classes, which will be made available as a digital edition on GAMS. In addition to didactic preparation, the possibilities and specifics of the medium of the "digital school edition" are also being researched.
The aim of the project is to develop the web portal (GRaF), i.e. the digital edition of a selection of fables (Phaedrus; selection from Avian) including a text-critical apparatus, which is designed with vocabulary information, translation, factual explanations and parallel texts combined with collections of materials for lesson design, taking into account the interests of the learners.

  • Funded by: BMWF, Sparkling Science
  • Duration: 2017-2019
  • Project contact: Gerlinde Schneider

In its third term, this project is dedicated to researching the prerequisites and dimensions of literary learning using medieval texts. The focus of the cooperation with the Department of German Studies is on the further development of the "Graz didactic text portal on medieval literature", which was created in previous projects. The portal makes the texts of the Styrian Literature Trails available as facsimiles as well as in transcription and translation and also offers tried-and-tested materials for different school levels and types, developed together with teachers, pupils and students. The (literary) world of the Middle Ages is thus made accessible as a (non-)educational and digital place of learning.

Further development and establishment of GAMS (Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management System) as an Austrian contribution to solving problems related to the long-term archiving and availability of research data, as part of Austria’s contribution to the European infrastructure project DARIAH.

The ecclesiastical province of Salzburg with its suffragan dioceses of Brixen, Freising, Passau, Regensburg and Salzburg played a decisive role in the cultural-historical development of Austria and Bavaria over many centuries. This makes it all the more important to make the numerous preserved liturgical-musical sources, which are an important part of this cultural-historical heritage, accessible in digital form and to evaluate them scientifically. In the academic study of Libri Ordinarii, the critical translation of the Latin texts must be followed by a well-founded analysis of the origins of the liturgy and the commentaries. The primary task of the project will be to transform the Ordinarii into TEI. In a second focus, the secondary sources, i.e. the liturgical and liturgical-musical sources such as graduals, missals, sequentiaries, antiphonaries, etc., are to be indexed and prepared for implementation in the web platform, so that behind the incipits of the Libri ordinarii the concrete forms, e.g. of a chant, are also available in complete form and with musical notation.

  • In cooperation with the Department of German Studies at the University of Vienna
  • Duration: 2017-2018
  • Project contact: Helmut Klug

Since 2015, a commentary on the individual prose works of this important Austrian satirist (1947-2011) has been compiled at the Department of German Studies at the University of Vienna as part of the FWF project "Kommentierte Werkausgabe Werner Kofler (Prosa)" (P 27418). This commentary forms the basis of the present publication project. The digital commentary is part of a hybrid edition in which the primary text is published in book form. The commentary includes annotated archive and image material, which is made accessible via indices as well as spatial and temporal visualization.

  • In cooperation with the Austrian Academy of Sciences
  • Duration: 01.07.2014-30.11.2017
  • Project contact: Georg Vogeler and Martina Bürgermeister

The FWF project P 26.706 has set itself the goal of collecting illuminated medieval documents, making them available on the monasterium.net platform and examining them comprehensively. It has a pan-European focus, is deliberately interdisciplinary and sees the use of information technology as a central part of the project.

Material acquisition, cataloging and scientific evaluation are seen as a unit. State-of-the-art web-based technologies, traditional documentary and cultural-scientific interpretative approaches jointly enable new findings and provide material for further studies.

  • Duration: 2016-2017
  • Project contact: Helmut Klug

Paolo Santonino and a group of travelers led by the Bishop of Udine travelled through East Tyrol, Carinthia, Carniola and the former Mark an der Sann in three journeys. Santonino describes these journeys, which took place in the years 1485-87, the landscape and the people in minute detail and lists, among other things, the names of the diners and the individual courses for each meal that was served. The project makes the first two voyages available as an electronic resource.

  • In cooperation with the university museums
  • Duration: 2014-2017
  • Project contact: Carina Koch, Elisabeth Steiner

The collection established by Hans Gross in 1895 - consisting of "corpora deliciti" - was founded as the "Criminal Museum at the Provincial Court for Criminal Matters" in Graz and moved to the Karl-Franzens University of Graz in 1913, where it has been one of the holdings of the university museums since the creation of the "inter-faculty service area University Museums of the Karl-Franzens University of Graz". As part of the HRSM project "Repository of Styrian Scientific Heritage", the objects of the Hans Gross Crime Museum were inventoried, digitally recorded and displayed for the first time according to the latest museological standards.

  • In cooperation with the GrazMuseum
  • Duration: 2014-2017
  • Project contact: Carina Koch

As part of the cooperation project "Repository of Styrian Scientific Heritage", the postcard collection of the GrazMuseum will be put online. The inventory of the postcards has already been prepared with the Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna (2012-2014). Content-related and methodological questions were developed together with specialist scholars, with the aim of taking into account the specific characteristics of the hybrid media type "postcard" in the interplay of image and text. The digital processing of the postcard collection offers different approaches to the collection and makes unique sources of Graz's city history accessible to the general public.

  • In cooperation with TU, KUG, GrazMuseum, Province of Styria, Diocesan Archive Graz-Seckau
  • Duration: 2014-2017
  • Project contact: Elisabeth Steiner

The web portal that emerged from the HRSM project"Repository of Styrian Scientific Heritage" provides all interested parties with access to digitally recorded cultural heritage that is stored and researched at various locations in Styria. The more than 25,000 digitally available resources can be searched and filtered according to various criteria. At the same time, virtual tours offer the opportunity to engage with the objects in a playful way and take a virtual stroll through the collections. Descriptions of the partner institutions and background information on the project round off the presentation.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Romance Studies
  • Duration: 2010 - 2017
  • Project contact: Martina Scholger

The journalistic genre of the "Spectators" or moral weeklies, which began in England at the beginning of the 18th century, soon spread throughout Europe before becoming an important indicator of the discourse system of the Enlightenment. The content of the moral weeklies was primarily aimed at a broad urban readership. These writings were intended to disseminate the ideas and values of the Enlightenment in an entertaining way. As such, they were also instrumental in shaping public opinion. This edition project aims to create a central collection of all European moral weeklies. Currently, representations and analyses of Spanish, Italian, French, German and English texts are available. Numerous perspectives of the levels of representation and narrative forms are made visible.

  • in cooperation with the Department of Slavic Studies
  • Duration: 2016-2018
  • Project contact: Carina Koch

The aim of the project is to create a virtual collection of postcards from Lower Styria (today's Slovenian Štajerska) from the period from 1885 to 1920, focusing on the bilingual nature of this historical region, which was increasingly characterized by nationality conflicts during this period. The electronic resource is intended to make the material searchable according to content and linguistic criteria and thus contribute to research into the shared history of the area inhabited by Slovenes and Germans. To this end, a data model, disseminators and various visualization options are being developed at the center.

The Writing Platform sees itself as an interdisciplinary space for a theoretical, methodological, practical and conceptual exchange on writing research involving researchers from the digital humanities, literary and cultural studies, art studies, writing and subject didactics and sociology. The platform acts as an interdisciplinary interface between the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Information Modelling (ZIM), the Center for Didactics (fdz), the Research Unit for General and Comparative Literature (AVL) and the Writing Center of the University of Graz. The aim is to bring together different questions, methodological models and concepts of writing research and to question and further develop their possibilities for the respective subject area in a multi-perspective exchange. To this end, the platform regularly organizes internal and public events on central questions of writing.

The platform is coordinated by the Center for Cultural Studies.

  • Funded by: Internal project/university space structure funds
  • Duration: 2015-2016
  • Project contact: Elisabeth Steiner

In 2014, the texts of the founding charter of the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz and imperial and papal confirmations as well as descriptions of the insignia of the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz were published in book form. The main contents of the publication were converted into a digital form of presentation and, in addition to an independent presentation, are also included in the "Repository of Styrian Scientific Heritage" portal.

  • In cooperation with the Franz Nabl Institute for Literary Research
  • Duration: 2016
  • Project contact: Hans Clausen

Ödön von Horváth is one of the most highly regarded German-language authors of the 20th century. The project page Ödön von Horvath: Historical-Critical Edition - Digital Edition summarizes the editorial efforts made for his work. It provides an insight into the methodology of the historical-critical book edition and also offers a digital edition of Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (1931) as a prelude to the digitization of his complete dramatic oeuvre. A particular focus of this digital edition is the use of visualization techniques (network graphs) as a new analytical tool in the digital humanities.

  • Funded by: Internal project/university space structure funds
  • In cooperation with the Department of Archaeology
  • Duration: 2011 - 2016
  • Project contact: Elisabeth Steiner

The original and cast collection of the Department of Archaeology was founded in 1865 and is open to the public on the 2nd floor of the main building of the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. As part of the "Repository of Styrian Scientific Heritage", the data of the original collection, which was already available online, was fundamentally revised and supplemented by a virtual tour.

  • In cooperation with the Department of German Studies
  • Duration: 2013-2016 (Cooperation ZIM: 2015)
  • Project contact: Hans Clausen

The project "Dialect Cultures II - Database Launch, Editions and Aesthetics" (FWF project number: P 25573-G23) in cooperation with the Department of German Studies (Christian Neuhuber, Priv.-Doz. Mag. Dr) aimed to digitally index and manage the wealth of Bavarian-Austrian dialect art developed in the previous project "Dialect Cultures I" with the help of the digital repository GAMS in the sense of long-term archiving and to make it accessible to a broad public by creating a project website.
To this end, the data already recorded in the XML standard (DI Alexander Nussbaumer) was transferred to the humanities data standard TEI and created as virtual objects in GAMS. As the individual resources were linked to each other by means of hyperlinks and RDF statements, the project website offers the user not only a search function but also networked access to the entire corpus of Bavarian-Austrian dialect art.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Romance Studies
  • Duration: 2010-2016
  • Project contact: Gerlinde Schneider and Elisabeth Steiner

As a continuation of the FWF project "Dictionnaire historique de l'adjectif-adverbe" of the Department of Romance Studies, a TEI-based, morphosyntactically annotated text corpus is being built up here under the project management of Martin Hummel and fed into a web representation via innovative data structures and frameworks for which the Center is responsible.

  • Funded by: Internal project/university space structure funds
  • Duration: 2010-2016
  • Project contact: Elisabeth Steiner

The Department of Ancient History and Classical Studies at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz keeps a collection of copies of Latin and Greek inscriptions. These were photographed and digitally processed at the Graz University Library's Digitization Centre and the inscriptions depicted on them were transcribed, translated and annotated in detail by specialist scholars. The ZIM manages and archives both the digital copies and the indexing data so that the collection is available for research and teaching purposes.

  • In cooperation with the Department of History
  • Duration: 2012 - 2015
  • Project contact: Gunter Vasold

In this cooperation project with the Department of History at the University of Graz and the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (funded by the FWF and DFG), the aim is to systematically record and index subject supplications in the form of a database and thus to investigate a hitherto little-noticed component of the political order of the Old Kingdom. The resulting database will be made available on the Internet for secondary analyses. In the first stage of the project, ZIMig designed a complex database in consultation with the scholars and programmed a REST-based web interface for data collection and processing.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Folklore and the Department of History
  • Duration: 2014-2015
  • Project contact: Christian Steiner

The Virtual Museum of the University of Graz is the final project of the 2012-2014 EuroMACHS (Europe, Media, Arts and Cultural Heritage Studies) Master's program. The aim of the project was to develop an expandable virtual museum for the collections of the University of Graz, which are scattered throughout the departments. For the time being, two collections from the university's holdings were used as examples: The Meringer Collection of the Department of Folklore and Cultural Anthropology and the Seal Collection of the Department of History of the University of Graz.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Philosophy
  • Duration: 2012-2015
  • Project contact: Elisabeth Steiner

The aim of this project of the Franz Brentano Archive Graz (funded by the Franz Brentano Foundation Boston) is to make the entire estate of the German-Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano (1838-1917) accessible to the scientific public in the form of digital facsimiles of his philosophical manuscripts and correspondence. This digital archive will subsequently be expanded into a text-critical online edition based on the TEI guidelines.

  • In cooperation with the Department of German Studies
  • Duration: 2013-2014
  • Project contact: Gerlinde Schneider

As part of this project, a freely accessible, virtual didactic environment is being created to make it easier for teachers to deal with the topic of medieval literature in the classroom. The portal provides the texts of the Styrian Literary Paths as facsimiles as well as transcriptions and translations and also offers tried-and-tested materials for different school levels and types, developed together with teachers, pupils and students. The (literary) world of the Styrian Middle Ages is thus made accessible as a (non-)educational and digital place of learning.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Romance Studies
  • Duration: 2012 - 2013

In this project of the Department of Romance Studies, texts that pose the question of the relationship between art and reality, which has always been constitutive in aesthetics and poetics, are systematically organized and analytically prepared for the first time. On the one hand, the collection of texts functions as an anthology and covers various genres from the 18th to the 21st century. On the other hand, a system of text analysis developed for the project, which is based on categories of different orders, selected key passages and an index, enables several approaches to the texts.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Ancient History and Classical Studies
  • Duration: 2010 - 2013

The Department of Ancient History and Classical Studies at the University of Graz is the only comparable Austrian department with an extensive collection, including a respectable coin collection comprising almost 4000 ancient coins. The collection ranges from Classical Greece to significant holdings of Hellenistic and Celtic coins and objects from the Migration Period and Byzantine times. The majority of the collection consists of coins from the Roman period, and the digital processing of the collection presents all numismatically relevant data as well as accessible archival information, including images, for each coin as part of the "Ancient History Online Portal".

  • In cooperation with the Department of German Studies
  • Duration: 2012 -
  • Project contact: Gunter Vasold

The project 'Variant Grammar of Standard German', funded by the FWF under project number I 716-G18, is dedicated to the grammatical, areally determined variation of German. While vocabulary phenomena have been relatively well studied (classic examples such as Semmel vs. Brötchen), the areas of morphology and morphosyntax (e.g.: bei jmdm. beantragen vs. jmdm. beantragen) or syntax (e.g.: Gut, gibt es Bauern. vs. Gut, dass es Bauern gibt.) have received little attention to date. The project thus provides the first corpus-based documentation of grammatical differences in a handbook that will be designed for both lay and academic purposes. The Department of Digital Humanities supports the research process by providing a virtual research environment that facilitates the structured collection, documentation and interpretation of research data.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Ancient History and Classical Studies
  • Duration: 2009 - 2012

Several projects of the Department of Ancient History and Classical Studies are condensed here into an online portal of ancient history: "Violence in Ancient Societies", "Between Hellenic Consciousness and Polis Membership", "Spectatores", the "Numismatic Collection" and the "Epigraphic Collection" are already accessible, and work is currently underway to complete the "Prosophography of Ancient Hetaera".

  • In cooperation with the Department of Theoretical and Applied Translation Studies
  • Duration: 2009 - 2012

As part of a longitudinal study, this project investigates the development of translation skills in a process-oriented manner. GAMS supports researchers in this (FWF) project in the management and analysis of multimodal, qualitative data.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Ancient History and Classical Studies
  • Duration: 2010 - 2012

What effects did ethnicity have on alliance politics and the formation of stereotypes? Was it used for propaganda or rhetoric? As a basis for this research project, the FWF-funded project is creating an annotated collection of sources in the original language and in translation, which can also be used by other academic disciplines. The implementation of this collection in an XML-based system enables digital publication (incl. unique addressing of each individual quotation), sustainable archiving (content is available in different contexts) and interchangeability, as well as the indexing of the content independently of the project's research question in connection with other collections (see "gewalt").

  • In cooperation with the Department of German Studies
  • Duration: 2010 - 2011

"Hugo von Montfort - the poetic work" is a hybrid edition that explores how a poetic work of the Middle Ages can be represented in its multimedia form. The text can be received in the following forms: Reading version, eye version, audio version, melody version. The accompanying internet platform for the new edition can be accessed here. The eye version realized here is based on a graphetically detailed basic transliteration and combines the transcription with images of the manuscript.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Ancient History and Classical Studies
  • Duration: 2009 - 2011

The collection of sources on the subject of "Violence in Antiquity" is being compiled by staff at the Department of Ancient History and Classical Studies in collaboration with scholars from other research institutions. Texts and other surviving sources (images, sculptures, etc.) from antiquity that are relevant in this context are being collected, described and indexed, and the tried and tested workflow (Word document → TEI document → web publication) is proving to be particularly optimal in this project. The collection and description of sources can be carried out from any location; the collection is edited and compiled in Graz. In this way, a digital, categorized and publicly accessible collection can be successively created, the content of which is also available for other purposes (printed work, interchangeability with other collections - see "ethnos", etc.).

  • In cooperation with the Department of History
  • Duration: 2010-2011

The course is aimed at students on the BA History course and, of course, anyone else at KFU who is interested. The selection of texts is deliberately aimed at this target group. The structure of the learning portal corresponds to the structure of the BA and MA programs in History. The further expansion of the offer for students of the MA program is planned, but will depend on the available personnel and financial resources.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Art History
  • Duration: 2009-2011

GINKO is the official online image database of the Department of Art History at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz. The collection is intended as a supplementary online resource for image research for art history research and teaching. Both solitary image collections (only available at the Graz Department) and individually requested, digitized image materials - not available in the recommended databases - are made available. Both the project-related image collections and the general "image pool" are continuously expanded in the context of research and teaching.

  • In cooperation with the Academy for New Media and Knowledge Transfer
  • Duration: 2009-2011

Here you will find a collection of podcasts on various topics from research and teaching at the University of Graz. The aim of this offer is to use new media technologies to promote the communication of scientific content in an up-to-date and appealing way. The podcast portal of the University of Graz is a joint project of the Vice-Rectorate for Studies and Teaching, the Center for Information Modeling in the Humanities and the Academy for New Media and Knowledge Transfer.

  • In cooperation with the Center for the History of Science
  • Duration: 2011

Online edition of letters from 1790 to the end of 1819. The orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall was one of the central figures of systematic-scientific oriental studies and corresponded with numerous personalities throughout his life, which are published in this edition with his "Memories from my life".

  • In cooperation with the Departments of History of the Universities of Graz and Klagenfurt, Carinthian Provincial Museum, Gurk Cathedral Archives
  • Duration: 2010 - 2011

Together with the Departments of History of the Universities of Graz and Klagenfurt, the Carinthian State Museum and the Gurk Cathedral Archives, innovative ways of multimodal representation of documents are being explored, with particular attention being paid to the possibility of interactive linking of transcripts, text-critical commentaries and facsimiles. An FWF application is in preparation.

  • In cooperation with the Archive for the History of Sociology in Austria
  • Duration: 2009-2010

The aim of this online edition is to make all of L. Gumplowicz's books, essays and articles available to interested parties. Not all texts will be made available in the first published version, but additions will be made on an ongoing basis. All original documents are available as TEI-compliant(Text Encoding Initiative) XML documents and are available in the HTML or PDF representation formats. The representation is true to the respective original in terms of pages and paragraphs and is therefore citable. The highlighting is largely true to the original, whereby the highlighting of personal names has been standardized as small caps.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Mathematics and Scientific Computing, the Department of History and the Academy of New Media
  • Duration: 2009

The Department of Mathematics visualizes and animates basic quantum mechanical concepts and topics in several languages via our lead project GAMS. The Academy for New Media and Knowledge Transfer provides (media) didactic models and materials. The historical learning platform for students at the Department of History offers a collection of teaching materials on four centuries of history.

  • In cooperation with the Styrian Historical Commission
  • Duration: 2008

The 164 texts compiled here mark the beginning of a new edition of those legally relevant medieval documents (charters) from the period up to 1192 which have a connection to Styria. It covers the period in which Styria was not yet in personal union with Austria. The texts published (together with the accompanying scholarly apparatus) are therefore only the beginning of a planned larger whole: a fully accessible, text-based online publication

  • In cooperation with the Center for the History of Science
  • Duration: 2007 - 2008

The correspondence between Alexander and Emil Rollett as well as scientific letters from the scientific community to Alexander Rollett, the first holder of a professorship for physiology and histology at the Medical Faculty of the Karl-Franzens University of Graz, which was established in 1863, can be accessed via an edition of letters from the Center for the History of Science.

  • In cooperation with the Center for the History of Science
  • Duration: 2006 - 2008

The aim of this project is to provide a reader on the history of science for students, in which the content of a series of lectures dealing with the development of science up to the 18th and 20th centuries is included. These lectures, together with all the accompanying material (biographical notes, images, sketches, terminological notes, etc.), are to be made available on the Internet using a workflow developed by INIG (Word document → TEI document → web publication) and the underlying information management systems (GAMS and BArch).

  • Commissioned by the Faculty of Humanities, in cooperation with the ZID.
  • Duration: 2007-2008

With the introduction of the UNIGRAZonline information management system, a standardized data source is now available. It is no longer necessary to store personal and other content (e.g. office hours, courses, publications, etc.) in redundant and high-maintenance databases. In cooperation with Graz University of Technology, an interface to UNIGRAZonline has enabled the INIG to process a wide range of information, and the results from this interface will be integrated into the department pages of the Faculty of Humanities - whose relocation to the web server and the CMS of the ZID is currently being prepared. The central entry point for this information will be the staff page (test page), which will now also include access to publications, teaching and projects in addition to office hours and telephone numbers.

  • Commissioned by the Faculty of Humanities, in cooperation with the ZID.
  • Duration: 2007-2008

Since the dissolution of the GewiLab service unit, the task of maintaining the department homepages of the Faculty of Humanities has been taken over by INIG staff as an additional activity. This task is now carried out by the ZID and the homepages are transferred to the university's content management system. This transfer is being accompanied by the INIG (structure creation and layout) and technically implemented in cooperation with the ZID.

  • On behalf of the Faculty of Humanities
  • Duration: 2004 - 2007

  • On behalf of the Faculty of Humanities
  • Duration: 2004 - 2005

  • In cooperation with the Department of Romance Studies
  • Duration: 2006 - 2007

The project comprises a digitized complete edition of the essays of the Graz Romance philologist Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus published in academic journals and anthologies. The available texts were encoded in XML using a format template generated by INIG and subsequently optimized at our Department for publication on the Internet (HTML) or as a print format (PDF). We are currently working on a detailed analysis of the texts with regard to various lexemes (name and subject index, technical terms, etc.).

  • In cooperation with the Department of Classical Philology
  • Duration: 2007

The subject of the research project is the research and categorization of all texts and bibliographical information on the reception of antiquity at the Jesuit University of Graz. In close cooperation with the staff of the Department of Classical Philology, a concept for structuring the content, which is essential for an electronic edition, was developed. The INIG is responsible for the workflow (Word document → TEI document → web publication) as well as for the technical implementation and the web presentation.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Austrian Legal History and European Legal Development
  • Duration: 2006 - 2007

The extensive collection of illustrations on legal iconography was made publicly accessible in February 2007 and serves primarily as teaching material. High-quality, zoomable graphics become an information pool for teaching and research through descriptive texts, dating, categorization and indexing. The search function enables user-friendly access to the numerous illustrations in the collection, which can be expanded as desired both in scope and in the form of presentation (material by course, material on specific categories, print edition).

  • In cooperation with the Department of General Pedagogy at the Institute of Educational Science
  • Duration: 2006 - 2007

This database-supported website of the Institute of Educational Science provides an insight into the biography, work and publications of educators from Austria and Eastern Europe and enables an (inter)national research community to maintain the database web-based. Existing data material was imported and modeled at the INIG in a database model newly created under PostgreSQL. Database queries are generated using the XML framework Cocoon and made accessible to the user via an easy-to-use web interface. Different views of the content (sorting by person, department and location) and an extended search function enable user-friendly access.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Ancient History and Classical Studies
  • Duration: 2006 - 2007

The Spectatores source archive represents the first attempt to collect all the evidence of Greco-Roman antiquity on the subject of spectatorship, to process it in a user-friendly way and to make it accessible for a wide range of questions. In addition, the relevant specialist literature is assigned to the respective sources, and the chosen medium allows for additions and updates, so that the information provided can always be kept up to date.

  • In cooperation with FH-Joanneum and WU Vienna
  • Duration: 2005 - 2006

The content pool gives you an overview of the status of the use of new media in teaching at Austrian universities and universities of applied sciences and shows you a "track record" of innovative, media-supported teaching projects. The Content Pool also aims to contribute to the networking of actors and cooperation partners.

  • In cooperation with the "Treffpunkt Sprachen"
  • Duration: 2001 - 2004

LAMM is a database-supported language learning environment that currently comprises approx. 600 cloze exercises for 7 languages at different learning levels. The program was implemented using Java and XML; all that is required to use it is a browser and the Java runtime environment (already integrated in newer operating systems). LAMM follows an open concept: language teachers can use the existing material and create new exercises and load them into the database. The exercises are created using a wizard, whereby the cloze texts can be noted down very easily. The current project phase is working on the implementation of multimedia listening comprehension exercises and on simplifying the client software for the exercise creators.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Art History
  • Duration: 2004

The task of the "Grazer Rezensionsseite" is to review new publications in the field of art history. The technical realization, design and implementation as a website (including full text search and print version) was carried out at the INIG.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Art History
  • Duration: 2004

medienkunst.at' sees itself as a university-based platform for the presentation and discussion of current media and net.art positions. The presentation and discussion of representative works of art from special fields of installation, video or computer art as well as the latest tendencies within net.art or software.art is intended to stimulate a scientific discourse on the art forms addressed as well as on the art-scientific and methodological approach. The graphic and technical implementation of the website - accessible through a category search - was realized with Cocoon and a relational database.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Romance Studies
  • Duration: 2002 - 2003

Based on international cooperation , the 3-year project is designed to collect phraseological units of everyday speech in Spain and Hispanoamerica with the final purpose of devising a dictionary including regionally specific as well as common panhispanic idioms and routine formulae. Detailed descriptions of their meanings/functions, formal properties, restrictions and self-explaining examples should permit both passive and active use of the DFH by foreign-language students and teachers alike.The INIG contributed to this project by creating and implementing a multilingual database model and supplying a GUI client.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Slavic Studies
  • Duration: 2008 -
  • Project contact: Gerlinde Schneider

Based on the IMS Corpus Workbench of the Department of Natural Language Processing at the University of Stuttgart, this FWF project created a structure for the construction of multimodal parallel language corpora for the Department of Slavic Studies. In the planning, conception and implementation of the workflow for the construction of the language corpus, special consideration had to be given to the requirement for the mass standardization of documents laid down in the project application, as well as to aspects of an AMS (=Asset Management System) controlled administration of the corpus texts.