CIDOC Personen Inventarisierungsprozess in Runkelstein 1493

Semantic Analyses

CIDOC Personen Inventarisierungsprozess in Runkelstein 1493

Our project explores the significance of inventories as dynamic products of cultural practices, distinguishing between person-related and space-related inventories. Person-related inventories usually list a person’s movable possessions, whilst space-related inventories focus on the movable furnishings of buildings and rarely include fixed elements such as kitchenettes or wall panelling.

We use inventories as a bridge to archaeological, architectural, pictorial and literary sources. The analysis aims to understand the relationships between people, objects and spaces. In doing so, we take into account both material aspects (such as quantity, colour and quality) and social considerations (such as actions, individuals and the histories of objects), as well as spatial information.

Our research focuses on spatially-related inventories, particularly castle inventories, and thus fills a gap in the research. We investigate how objects are linked to specific spaces, whether there are gender-specific objects, information on the use of the objects and their relationships to people or other objects, as well as insights into castles as social spaces. We use a specialised tag set for the historical-semantic analysis.

Our project is researching the language of inventories in order to catalogue historical language corpora and understand the object descriptions contained in the inventories. We are compiling a glossary that catalogues the semantic content of the inventories and clarifies historical terms used for objects. The inventories, written in Early New High German, Renaissance Italian and Neo-Latin, serve as the basis for a thesaurus that contributes to the ontological cataloguing of the semantic worlds of the inventories.

We use automatic linguistic annotation to integrate the texts into a corpus-based system, applying existing methods from similar projects. CIDOC-CRMontology, an ISO standard in the digital humanities, helps us to represent the relationships between inventory records, objects and spaces.

The final thesaurus is based on the vocabularies extracted from the inventories, supplemented by concepts from existing thesauri such as the Getty AAT. We are implementing the thesaurus in SKOS-Formatformat in order to make it accessible to the Semantic Web community for knowledge organisation systems such as thesauri and taxonomies.

In the third part of our project, we link the information gleaned from the inventories – concerning the relationships between objects, people, practices and spaces – with Tyrolean castles, whether still standing or preserved as ruins. These castles are not only extensively documented in written sources, but also offer the opportunity to reconstruct the historical sequence of spaces.

We draw on existing research findings, such as the *Tiroler Burgenbuch* and the architectural history of Tyrol Castle, and combine these with information from the inventories. Our aim is to make this combined data available to both academics and the interested public via a website. This contributes to the further exploration of the cultural heritage of Tyrolean castles.

A particular focus of our project is to challenge the predominantly male perspective on castles and to take a step towards an inclusive, gender-sensitive interpretation that takes into account historical differences in terms of gender.