Keynote by Daniel Smail 

From the twelfth century onward, a growing body of household inventories survive in European archives. Decades of scholarship have used inventories to provide insight into material environments and consumption patterns characteristic of late medieval communities. But inventories are more than just windows onto past materialities. Every inventory is also an exercise in phenomenology, revealing how the compilers of inventories conceived of things and their attributes. Focusing on household spaces, this lecture explores an emerging approach to inventories, one that seeks to enter the thought-worlds of the people who lived in late medieval cities and reconstruct aspects of their phenomenological experience.

Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, where he works on the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600 and on deep human history. In medieval European history, his work explores the legal, social, and cultural history of the cities of Mediterranean Europe, with a focus on Marseille in the later Middle Ages. He has covered subjects ranging from women and Jews to legal history and spatial imagination, the subject of his first book, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (1999). His 2016 book, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe, approaches transformations in the material culture of the later Middle Ages using household inventories and inventories of debt collection from Lucca and Marseille. With other colleagues, he directs the online collection “The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe.” Smail’s work in deep history and neurohistory has addressed some of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of these approaches to the human past. His books include The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (2003); On Deep History and the Brain (2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (2011).

Smail has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and his publications have received several prizes. In 2007, he received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize from the undergraduates of Harvard University, and, in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In March 2023, he was awarded a Doctor of Arts honoris causa by the Universeit Antwerpen.

Keynote by Christina Antenhofer|Barbara Denicolò|Elisabeth Tangerner

Medieval and early modern castle inventories are not objective lists of what was found in a castle at a particular time. Rather, they are the product of the social practice of inventorying. As such, they follow certain patterns and respect conventions. Although they are administrative documents with a specific purpose, they also tell episodes of everyday life in these castles. The very process of cataloguing things can be analysed as a narrative that creates meaning by ordering objects and spaces. This article aims to present inventories as treasure chests full of both overt and covert narratives that can be traced not only in the narrative sections, but also in the design of the texts and their materiality. Through a comparative, detailed analysis of the inventory texts, their material form and their accompanying documents, this paper discusses the most remarkable stories in order to illuminate the different types of storytelling in and through inventories from a macro- and micro perspective.

We look through the keyhole into the interior of selected castles in historic Tyrol and gain insights into the actions, emotions, memories, knowledge and sensory experiences associated with the objects. We learn about the personal attitudes, sensitivities and opinions of the people involved and about events that were directly or indirectly connected with them and were worth mentioning. By placing the surviving inventories of a castle in chronological order, it is possible to trace the changes that have occurred over time, as well as the gifts, losses, or destruction that may have affected the castle and the single objects. Furthermore, the inventories themselves tell stories, particularly through their material characteristics, such as furnishings and internal organisation. The paper explores how an in-depth semantic annotation of castle inventories helps to bring out the manifold stories hidden in these documents.

Paper by Chiara Piccoli

This paper delves into the sources and the process of creating a 3D reconstruction hypothesis of the private library of Pieter de Graeff (1638-1707), Amsterdam patrician and director of the Dutch East India company in the Amsterdam chamber.

The research on the library aimed to reconstruct not only the book collection but also the physical space within De Graeff’s residence along the Herengracht, one of Amsterdam’s grand canals. To this end, it leverages a variety of archival sources (including De Graeff’s probate inventory and ego-documents), De Graeff’s book auction catalogue and building historical research. These resources have been instrumental in locating the library within the house (which, despite modifications over the centuries, still stands today) and in formulating a 3D reconstruction hypothesis of the room’s interior.

The paper further explores the development of an online interactive 3D digital scholarly edition of the library in the context of the Pure 3D project. A significant aspect of the discussion is the challenge of conveying the degrees of certainty associated with the reconstruction hypothesis. This study underscores the potential of 3D technology in aiding historical research and in making forgotten historical spaces and narratives visible and accessible again.

Chiara Piccoli is Research Associate and Data Scientist at the 4D Research Lab of the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests focus on historical urban landscapes, domestic architecture, architectural heritage, and book history. She specialized in the use of 3D modelling and GIS mapping for historical data visualisation, analysis, and communication. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the NWO-funded Virtual Interiors project and researcher in the European project ‘The Collective Experience of Empathic Data Systems’ (CEEDs). Chiara holds a PhD in Archaeology from Leiden University, an MA degree in Archaeology from the University of Siena and an MA degree in Book and Digital Media Studies from Leiden University.

Paper by Thomas Pickles

Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES) is a UKRI AHRC funded project to produce a web resource housing a database for the evidence for churches in Britain and Ireland before about 1100 AD, an online exhibition space, and teaching resources for use in schools. Using Pilot Data we worked with Primary and Secondary School teachers to co-create course structures, lesson plans, and resources to enable teachers to exploit the web resource in schools. This paper will reflect on the possibilities, challenges, and practicalities of using a digital platform for the reconstruction of the past in schools. First, it will introduce the project and web resource, with a focus on the adaptations we made to the web resource, data structure and pilot data in response to teacher feedback. Second, it will introduce the course structure, lesson plans and resources we co-created, emphasising those elements requiring reconstruction of the past. Finally, it will reflect on the relationship between the past and its reconstruction in the activities and outcomes expected of the students.

Tom Pickles is Associate Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Chester. His research focuses on the socio-cultural history of the early middle ages, particularly religious institutions, and combines texts with archaeology, material culture, and place-names. He is author of Kingship, Society, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) and Principal Investigator of the UKRI AHRC funded project Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES: www.earlychristianchurchesandlandscapes.wordpress.com). 

Paper by Bas Spliet

This article answers a simple question: Who or what pulled the rug from underneath the demand for Dutch paintings in the second half of the seventeenth century? Previous explanations, such as diminished purchasing power, overproduction, depleted social distinction potential, and budget and space constraints, are tested with a unique database of Amsterdam probate inventories – conspicuous in the monetary valuation of all recorded artworks and other household objects – but ultimately found insufficient. Following scholars like Jan de Vries and Bruno Blondé, I maintain that the downfall of the painting industry is best explained within the framework of the consumer revolution, on which this case study offers a fresh perspective by arguing that the ascent of fashion gave rise to a consumer version of creative destruction. The modernity of Holland’s burgeoning consumer society was borne out of the fact that Dutch burghers simply lost interest.

Bas Spliet (°1995) is a PhD candidate History at the University of Antwerp and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He obtained his Master in History summa cum laude from the University of Ghent, where he also attained a Bachelor in History and a Bachelor in Arabic and Islamic Studies. In 2021, he received the André Schaepdrijver prize for best master’s thesis from the Oud-Studenten Geschiedenis Universiteit Gent, and in 2023, he was granted the Matthieu et al. scholarship for promising researchers by the Research Council of Antwerp University. He sits on the editorial board of Stadsgeschiedenis.

By Katherine Wilson

Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries 1000-1700 (MOB) is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) interdisciplinary research project which examines the transformations in objects and their uses across Western Europe. During the period 1000-1700 a series of economic transformations occurred that fundamentally overturned existing commercial practices and revolutionized the lives of objects and peoples across Western Europe. The first AHRC funded project sought to understand these transformations in material culture by asking scholars to think across and step out of their traditional periods and disciplines to examine how changes took place in relation to the world of things. It focused on mobility, because mobility allows a move away from geographic specificity for co-creative impact work with stakeholders and the public, providing productive ways to pursue the local and the global, and a reflection on the dynamic networks of interchange, exchange and circulation of people and things. The work of the first project included analysis of a range of everyday objects drawn from the extensive but rarely seen and underexplored medieval collections of the Grosvenor Museum in Chester.

This paper will focus on the second grant awarded to the MOB project by the AHRC, a grant focused specifically on bringing the academic research of the first grant to wider audiences, designated as a grant for ‘public engagement and impact’. The paper will explore the challenges and opportunities of the digital approaches developed by the project over the 12 months of the grant: the choices behind its digital reconstructions of medieval Chester landmarks, its subsequent Virtual Reality models and public testing of landmarks and interiors, and its current development of a new public museum database prototype, suitable for academic and public research and crowdsourcing contributions to the catalogue. It will suggest that digital approaches to cultural heritage can have significant effects on local culture and economies as well as for academic research. In addition, the paper will argue that our research should not simply be ‘presented’ to public, heritage or educational stakeholders, that instead our research must incorporate co-creative approaches with public, heritage and educational stakeholders from the very beginning to fully realize research potential.

Paper by Leon van Wissen

The digitization and publication of open data have witnessed significant growth in recent years, encompassing both the Digital Humanities (DH) and the cultural heritage (GLAM) domains. This not only makes research easier through increased availability of material but also facilitates more data-centric approaches in the humanities, unlocking more perspectives for research as datasets can be interlinked. However, the material dealt with in the DH field often presents unique challenges compared to other disciplines. For instance, digitized historical documents may be incomplete, damaged or missing, metadata can be inconsistent, and there are often issues related to the accurate representation of context and provenance. Someone working with this material really needs to be a domain expert to capture the nuances of the content and critically evaluate any biases and other limitations.

While cultural heritage institutions nowadays publish the material, they often lack the resources for contextualization and interpretation (such as disambiguation of persons and locations mentioned in archival records), leaving this task to researchers or large-scale research infrastructure projects. Such projects are building useful tools to unlock this material for their discipline while generating valuable research output. Therefore, a key challenge for the future lies in keeping the archival records and the resulting research output together, so that it can be easily accessed and used by others in future projects.

This talk will discuss the methodologies for extracting, enriching, and modeling data from archival resources within the Digital Humanities by drawing on experience from two Dutch Research Council (NWO) funded projects: Golden Agents (https://www.goldenagents.org/, 2016-2022) and GLOBALISE (https://globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/, 2022-ongoing). Furthermore, it explores the use of Linked Open Data principles to enhance contextualization, provenance, and data sharing between GLAM and academia. This approach not only facilitates deeper insights and interdisciplinary research but also democratizes access to cultural assets on a global scale.

Paper by Chiara Zuanni

This paper will reflect on the challenges and possibilities for representing with digital methods museum exhibition histories. Exhibitions are temporary assemblages of objects, presented according to curated narratives, and bringing together different actors. They are documented, to a varying extent, through museum archives, media reports, and visitor books (and, more recently, online content).

Studying exhibition histories is an emerging and productive field of study, allowing to uncover histories of knowledge, of museum practices, and of public reception of the exhibition subject matters. However, there is still a lack of digital methods for approaching this type of study: solutions, so far, included databases and websites with digitized exhibition catalogues, without visualisations of the exhibition itself, or – conversely – 3D visualisations of the museum spaces, disconnected from the archival data.

This paper will therefore propose an approach to connect archival and visitor data about exhibitions with 3D models of the museum galleries. It will do so, by drawing on examples of selected exhibitions in Austria and in the UK, presenting initial results of my research on exhibitions’ “digital twins”.

Chiara Zuanni is an associate professor in digital humanities, museology-focused, at the University of Graz. She studied classics and archaeology at the University of Bologna and obtained a PhD in Museology from the University of Manchester (2016). Afterwards, she held postdoctoral positions at the University of Liverpool (2016) and in the Research Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum (2016-2017). In 2018, she moved to the Centre for Information Modelling in Graz, where she completed her Habilitation in Digital Humanities in February 2024. Her research focuses on museum data and digital practices and their contribution to, and impact on, the development of heritage knowledge.

Paper by Christina Antenhofer, Barbara Denicolò, Elisabeth Tangerner

Interest in things is booming. As historical actors, artefacts, repositories of knowledge and sources of insight, as well as sensual experiences, they attract great interest in a range of sciences. Along with the things themselves, the written sources that captured them become central. Of these, inventories, in particular, are paradigmatic, created to list objects.

For a long time, inventories were used selectively to investigate exceptional artefacts. However, they are neither objective nor simple lists of things. They are far more than mere snapshots of the objects belonging to the castle, they are products of an inventory practice, with traces of this activity found both in the texts and in the materiality of the archive records. This inventorying practice and the actors involved are the focus of our ongoing project INVENTARIA (FWF P 35988 Stand Alone Project) dedicated to Tyrolean castle inventories of the 15^th and 16^th centuries. In this paper, we exemplify how digital methods, above all linked to the metadata of the documents, allow deeper insights into the complex set of practices related to the inventorying process. How did people go about cataloguing and describing all the objects found in a castle? How did they inspect the rooms, and which rooms were included and which were not? Who was involved in these processes and how was the wealth of objects, large and small, put into words and on paper? What happened to these inventories once they were completed? What were they used for?

Our aim is to analyse inventories from an event-centred perspective in order to focus on the process of inventorying. A comparative source-critical approach to the Tyrolean inventories currently being analysed by INVENTARIA reveals a multitude of differences and peculiarities in each piece, while at the same time identifying overarching similarities.

Paper by Walter Brandstätter and Stefan Zedlacher

Hohensalzburg Fortress, a symbol of episcopal power in Salzburg for centuries, is today one of the largest fully preserved castle complexes in Central Europe. To date, research on the fortress has been dominated by questions relating to building research and architecture. In contrast, the Digital Humanities project Hohensalzburg digital (2022-2024) is dedicated to aspects of social, cultural, and gender history. The project is based on information from historical inventories and aims to trace the rooms at Hohensalzburg, their furnishings, and their development over time, with the intention of making them digitally accessible. Our aim is not merely to reconstruct the rooms and the objects contained there, but also a visual representation of the itineraries relating to people who lived and worked at the fortress.  

This paper will illustrate the process that leads from the practical work with historical inventories to the three-dimensional space-time model of the fortress. Since space-related inventories such as those of Hohensalzburg are particularly suitable to provide insights into historical spatial structures, the initial question to be addressed is the extent to which they reflect the path chosen in the inventorying process. In addition, it will be necessary to ascertain what statements can be made about the categories of “privacy” and “public”. Are the sequences of rooms and their accessibility hierarchically structured? Who had access to the archbishop’s living quarters and how, and which rooms and barriers marked the way there? What conclusions can be drawn about the staff’s internal communication channels? In addition, the interconnections between the rooms, objects, and individuals referenced in the inventories and their related changes over time will be shown and subjected to critical analysis. Technological challenges, creative approaches, and unusual solutions to this problem will be presented and discussed. Finally, we will design a sketch of the three-dimensional space-time model that combines the written sources, the built spaces, and the virtual data in one application.

Paper by Christoph Breser and Ingrid Matschinegg

When interpreting building heritage from the Middle Ages, a lack of archival and structural sources often leads to simulated representations of former structural situations. In the case of exact representations, which sometimes means striving for more than one variant of historical reconstructions, plan views quickly become complex and confusing. Differentiations between factual and hypothetical findings are therefore often avoided in favour of a uniformly assumed historical state.

In the FWF research project INVENTARIA, 3D modelling of Tyrolean castles is carried out for simulation purposes, showing their structural condition between the 15th and 16th centuries. A particular challenge is posed by visualizing confirmed or unconfirmed reconstruction variants. This is an important issue when hiding later additions and reconstructing former building sections that no longer exist today. What are the best methods for approaching these historical reconstructions? What role do historical inventories play in this process? How do we deal with the historical conversions, which have a lasting impact on the overall appearance of the castle and the museum’s perception of life in the castle?

Selected castles from the historical Tyrol are used as examples to illustrate that we are dealing with three entities: 1. with the original, built castle, 2. with the narrated castle recorded via the inventories and 3. with the castle that can be experienced today as an inhabited or museum building. What (digital) tools are available to us to visualize all three entities equally? What contribution can our research results make to incorporate different levels of perception/layers into the building documentation in a standardized way in the future?

Short bio Christoph Breser

Studies in art and architectural history, history and Italian at the Universities of Graz and Siena. Self-employment in building surveys and monument preservation, among others, for the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of Monuments. From 2012 to 2018, University assistant in teaching and research for architectural history, building survey and monument preservation at the Graz University of Technology. In parallel, from 2012 to 2016, part of the research project  „Discourses on Architecture in post-war Styria“ at the Ludwig Bolzmann Institute as well as of the go!digital project „Renaissance Architecture – A Digital Anthology of Heinrich von Geymüller“ at the University of Graz. From 2018 to 2022, part of the research project „The Appropriation Strategies of Italy in South Tyrol and Trentino after the First World War“ at the University of Innsbruck, which led to the independent dissertation project on planning ethics within the fascist regime in Italy. Since 2023 scientific collaboration in the FWF research project INVENTARIA at the University of Salzburg (IMAREAL Krems), on building survey and spatial modelling of medieval/early modern castles in historical Tyrol.

Associate member of the DFG Programme 2255  „Cultural Heritage Construction“, of the DFG network  „Building Research for Recent Building Stocks“ (nbjb 1945+) and since 2022 member of the Graz Old Town Expert Commission.

Short bio Ingrid Matschinegg, Dr., Mag. phil

Studied History and German Studies at the University of Graz. Dissertation and other research projects on the social history of university attenders in the late Middle Ages and early modern period and on aspects of migration and regional mobility in the pre-modern period. Project collaborator at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Historical Social Science and the Department of History at the University of Vienna. 1995 to 2013 university lecturer at the Institute for Economic and Social History in Vienna. Since 2001 research associate at the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Realienkunde at the Austrian Acadeamy of Science and University of Salzburg. Main research interests: Methods and tools of the Digital Humanities, in particular their possible applications in the analysis of historical sources on material culture and in teaching. Cultural exchange processes; Human-Animal studies in the Middle Ages and early modern times.

For further information and list of publications see:

Ingrid Matschinegg

Paper by Elisabeth Gruber and  Peter Färberböck

ITEM, an online tool and repository in progress at IMAREAL, records material objects listed in historical inventories, account books and, in future, other object-related sources. As a result of the Raumordnungen project (2007-2010), the database was created to record objects listed in inventories in a structured manner. It focuses the relationships between objects, spaces and the related actions between objects and persons. Based on the relational working database originally created in the pilot project, the data was transformed into a graph database in order to make it easier to link it with linked open data and graph data with other real-world databases.

Using the software of the IMAREAL’s image database REALonline, a data structure was developed for this purpose, which is currently in the test phase. Along with all IMAREAL data tools based on the REALonline structure, ITEM offers RDF interfaces and thus provides ideal conditions for future query models based on LLM.

Current developments in the field of AI (artificial intelligence) make agent-controlled search queries possible, which will fundamentally expand the view of analysing historical sources.

– On backend level: improving data quality (e.g. adding the material of objects: ‘Bed frames are made of wood’). With the help of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), context information can be integrated automatically

– LLM as utility: How to generate SPARQL queries from normal regular language questions

– Pattern recognition: recognise and classify different qualities of medieval parlours (‘Stube’/‘Dürnitz’) with LLM

Case studies drawn from the source material of inventories illustrate the described range of applications. 

Elisabeth Gruber studied History and German Studies at the University of Salzburg (PhD 2002). Since 2015 she holds a position as a Senior Scientist (PostDoc) at the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, University of Salzburg. She is interested in material culture in urban and monastic spheres, including analog and digital methods of analysing sources. Her habilitation thesis focused on social interaction and material culture in urban spaces.

Elisabeth Gruber is member of the Institute of Austrian History Research and Member of the Research Group for Austrian Urban History (Vienna). She is co-editor of the open access jounal MEMO – Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture Online.

Since 2019, she is the managing Director of the IMAREAL and deputy Director of the Interdisciplinary Center of Medieval and Early Modern Studies in Salzburg.

Currently, she is fellow at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies „Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations“ at the Max Weber Kolleg in Erfurt.

https://www.imareal.sbg.ac.at/team/elisabeth-gruber/

Peter Färberböck works at the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (IMAREAL). His research focuses on ‚Medievalisms in video games‘ and current developments in digital humanities ; he is writing his doctoral thesis on blood magic in this medium in the graduate college programme ‚Interdisciplinary Research in Historical Cultures‘ at the ‚Interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies‘ at the University of Salzburg. His research draws on theories from performance studies, historical praxeology, and media studies.

(https://www.imareal.sbg.ac.at/team/peter-faerberboeck/)

Paper by Karoline Irschara, Gerhard Rampl and Elisabeth Gruber

The presentation will give an overview of the methods developed in the Inventaria project for extracting and standardising information from late medieval castle inventories. The inventories tell us about the inhabitants and the objects used in the castles, from everyday tools like cooking utensils and clothing, to religious artifacts, weapons, and jewelry. By converting the historical texts into machine-readable data, we can link the content to complex ontologies and also create a unique thesaurus of objects that can be used to facilitate efficient search as well as enhanced analysis. Key steps in data transformation and their challenges are briefly outlined, including traditional manual and semi-automated semantic annotation and the standardisation of annotated entities such as objects and materials. This process helped us to uncover a rich vocabulary, including many terms that are no longer in common use, such as: frawenmantel ‘woman’s cloak’, tartsche ‘shield’ and protschaf ‘container used for bread dough’. The Inventaria project has developed a comprehensive thesaurus in which terms are categorised and organised hierarchically. The hierarchy includes broader categories (e.g. ‚weapons‘), normalised orthography (e.g. Knechtisch Spieß ‘weapon of a Spießknecht’) and contemporary translations (e.g. Schild ’shield‘) of terms, as well as a glossary with historical explanations. This organisational model enables future users to find lost terms and objects without any prior knowledge of the content of the data. We will also present the criteria and rationale behind the categorisation within the thesaurus and show how this structured approach contributes to the preservation of cultural heritage. The unveiling of those items and terms provides insights into the daily life, religious practices and material culture of Tyrolean castles.

Karoline Irschara is a research associate and lecturer at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Innsbruck with research interests in corpus and discourse studies as well as feminist linguistics. She has been involved in several interdisciplinary research projects focusing on the relationship between language and gender, especially its influence on medical discourse. Her doctoral research involved the creation and analysis of a large corpus of radiology reports. In the Inventaria project, she is primarily concerned with the annotation and standardization of the historical text corpus.

Elisabeth Gruber-Tokić is currently employed as a research associate at the Department of Linguistics at the university of Innsbruck, participating in two projects: ViTA (project leader), Inventaria (research staff). Her research activities focus on the creation of historical text corpora and the development of a related workflow to process historical documents, including digitisation, transcription, semantic annotation and further the processing of data to create semantic representation of historical texts. Furthermore, she is involved in the scientific discipline of onomastics, specifically the research of microtoponyms and the historical development of names of pits and mines.

Akkordeon Inhalt

The Transkribus^[1] tool developed by the read-coop^[2] has proven valuable for digitising and transcribing historical, handwritten castle inventories and for adding initial annotations, especially annotations spanning larger regions of text, to these inventories. However, it is less well suited for adding fine-grained annotations, or detailed attributes to annotations and it does not offer options to automate any part of the annotation process.

In order to leverage the power of Transkribus and be able to annotate a host of castle inventories in a more timely fashion, a bespoke Import/Export-tool has been developed that interfaces with Transkribus and transforms its documents in a format more suited to large-scale annotation tasks.

This talk introduces the import/export tool developed within the Inventaria project in detail and shows its structure, user interface and its interaction with Transkribus for example via the Transkribus API, as well as challenges encountered during the development process. It demonstrates how to export digitised and partly annotated inventories from Transkribus into a predefined CSV file, and – if necessary – how to re-import new annotations from such CSV files back into Transkribus using the import/export tool.

^[1] https://www.transkribus.org/

^[2] https://readcoop.org/

Andrea Mussmann works at the Department of Linguistics at the university of Innsbruck as well as the Department of Computer Science. Her research interests include natural language processing, corpus linguistics, and software engineering. She is currently working on a custom tool to facilitate the import and export of annotated collections to and from Transkribus.

Paper by Milena Peralta-Friedburg and Gerald Hiebel

In 1493, Hans von Leuchtenburg handed over the administration of Runkelstein Castle in South Tyrol to Zyprian von Sarnthein. This process required the creation of a detailed inventory of the castle’s assets. The resulting document then had to be officially verified and approved by legally authorized individuals. Such events and their circumstances form a fundamental part of the inventory process itself. In this talk, we will present the methodology developed for the Inventaria project to represent inventory creation processes with the CIDOC CRM and create navigable knowledge graphs that make the information explicit. This allows us to study the inventorying process as an event itself involving questions about administrative events within the inventories, such as: Who were the experts and authorities present? What roles did they play during the event? In what sequence were rooms and categories of objects recorded? Furthermore, extensive metadata about the inventories as objects helps us to study the physical aspects of the inventories and provide valuable insights into the context of their creation. For example, what do they look like? How are they structured and arranged? We will use selected examples to demonstrate the functions of the resulting knowledge graphs, which reveal the complex and structured nature of historical inventories and offer a deeper understanding of medieval administrative practices. The knowledge graphs also facilitate the comparison and exploration of Tyrolean castle inventories through their metadata. We will show how this structured approach enhances our understanding of the inventories, allowing for in-depth analysis and research into their historical context and significance for the practice of inventory making.

Milena Peralta Friedburg is a research assistant at the Department of Linguistics at the university of Innsbruck, participating in two projects: Inventaria and ViTA. Her research interests focus on corpus lingustics, semantic annotation and data processing. In addition, she is currently specializing in semantic modelling using CIDOC CRM ontology and the visualisation of georeferenced data by creating thematic maps.

Gerald Hiebel is a Senior Scientist at the Institute of Archaeology and the Digital Science Center at the University of Innsbruck since 2020. After studying geography at the University of Vienna, he worked in the private sector and started in 2007 an academic career. His main research areas are geoinformation, ontologies and semantic technologies. He participated and led several projects of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) with a focus on data modelling and information integration for archaeological, linguistic and historic sources.