RIDE (Sep 2017)
Regesta Imperii online
Abstract
Regesta Imperii (RI) online is one of the fundamental platforms for medieval research. RI stands for a combination of tradition and innovation. Based on the printed volumes which have been released since the early 19th century up until now, the text collection brings together the traditional arrangement of the research project and the wide range of new possibilities resulting from the digital form of presentation. The long-term work process implies some consequences concerning the quality of the provided data: As the regests are transmitted on the website without revision, there are data records in different forms of elaborateness (length, details). With RIplus an additional, born-digital component, is available which offers data from volumes that haven't been published yet (work in progress), as well as data from other related research projects. RI provides all the regests in CEI, a subset of TEI-XML for diplomatic documents. Furthermore, the digital content (images, editions, authority files) is highly interlinked so that RI online spans a wide network for digital medieval research. All contents of RI online are freely available for subsequent use. Even though regests represent not transcriptions but summaries of charters, the data can serve as a “text collection” for different proposes, for instance, to study structural aspects of medieval forms of ruling or to explore the development of the research project itself from the perspective of history of science. Different approaches to analyze and visualize the data show the potential of this text collection for digital historians, as well as for (computer-)linguistic research.
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