Technical and methodological foundations of digital indexing of medieval and early modern court books

Abstract

Ever since the beginnings of the modern historiography, the court books have posed a challenge for editors in Poland, both due to their number and variety. They constitute one of the richest sources enabling a variety of historical research. The publication of the sources’ content can be shared owing to new approaches stemming from constant development of IT tools and their application in the humanities. The solution proposed in our article is a digital indexing based on a relational database enabling access to the sources’ scans. The characterization of the method is preceded by a description of the theoretical foundations of the presented method. The assumed principals are implemented by the use of a dedicated to this project online INDXR application which functionalities is thoroughly described. Using the INDXR application, the data acquired from the sources are collected and stored in the database which structure is also illustrated along with its theoretical foundations. The database is established in order to better reflect the typical elements comprising the court books as well as to store the acquired information. The issues stemming from the process of indexing the court books, such as categorizing of the entries, their spatial context, and the problem of how to describe the persons appearing in the manuscript are also presented.

Tell me where you are and I’ll tell you what you learn. Investigating hidden curricula using GIS analysis of place names in a case study of an English language textbook published in Japan

“…Finally, space, particularly presented on a map and culture have enjoyed attention by both cartographers (Cartwright, 2009;Har ley, 1989) and researchers studying cultures (Barcz & Waclawik, 2022;Hauberman, 2016;Szombara, 2021) There are, however, few studies, in which the pages of the source are treated as a plane for analysing spatial information such as topo logical relationships between types of content. One example particularly interesting from the perspective of this study is the Polish applica tion developed by the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Science (PAS) -INDEXR (https://atlas.ihpan.edu.pl/indxr/app/appoz_ kalisz_gr_31_pub/index.php), where historical sources are tagged for the place names they refer to and are presented both on the map and the pages of the books (Borek et al, 2020). The study here presented follows this approach by looking at both the pages of the textbooks and the geographic space they refer to.…”

Source-driven data model for geohistorical records’ editing: a case study of the works of Karol Perthées

“…5). The indexing of the source was based on its digital image and annotation in the vector model, and was implemented using the INDXR web application (Borek et al 2020).…”