DH Projects

https://www.imareal.sbg.ac.at/imareal-projekte/hohensalzburg-digital/; Baualterplan: Patrick Schicht; Illustration: Pixabay).

The aim of the project is the digital processing and linking of space and object-based information from historical sources and historical building data of Hohensalzburg. The gathered data will then be included in Time Machine Europe, with which a new way to experience virtual journeys through time and space has been established.
The project will be an interdiscipilinary cooperation of the department of History, the IZMF, the IMAREAL of the University of Salzburg and the fortress Hohensalzburg, the Time Machine organisation and the Insitute for architectur and media of the technical University of Graz.

The Department of Classical Studies at the University of Salzburg has 216 plaster casts, most of which were purchased in the 1970s. They are used as teaching materials for classical archaeology and art history and are displayed in the so-called beer cellar of the Alte Residenz. The plaster cast collection is unique in Austria in terms of its composition, so that some of the casts are occasionally loaned to other museums for display (e.g. a classical Amazon was loaned to the KhM Vienna for the exhibition ‘Idols & Rivals. Artists in Competition’, 20 September 2022–8 January 2023); However, it has only been accessible to the general public in exceptional cases (e.g. school tours, Long Night of Museums; the latter in 2024 with more than 1,000 visitors). Various courses have resulted in an extensive collection of catalogue texts and professional, uniform photographs of the casts. In addition, the department has archival records on acquisitions, restorations and the history of the collection.

The aim of the proposed project is to standardise and transfer existing digital material (catalogue texts and images) into an open access collection hosted by the University Library (https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/unisammlungen). In addition, a virtual tour of part of the department’s cast collection is to be created as an example and linked to some objects in the digital collection (comparable to the virtual tour on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the University of Salzburg, https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=PLQqJNWB5Qt) in order to examine the possibility of barrier-free access to the collection for teaching, research and the interested public in the future.

Ausschnitt aus dem Inventaria-Knowledge-Graph, erstellt mithilfe der Ontologie CIDOC CRM und den zugehörigen Erweiterungen (CRMtex, CRMsci). Das Beispiel zeigt die Erstellung des Inventars für das Schloss Runkelstein im Jahr 1493 im Zuge des Pflegerwechsels von Hans von Leuchtenburg an Zyprian von Sarnthein (linke Bildhälfte). Darüber hinaus sind all jene Personen angefügt, die an der Erstellung des Inventars beteiligt waren und im Protokoll namentlich erwähnt sind (rechte Bildhälfte) © Inventaria 2023.

The interdisciplinary and inter-university project Inventaria investigates what life was like in medieval castles, using objects as sources. We take a peek through the keyhole into selected castles in historic Tyrol. The project is based on inventories, which are lists of the furniture and equipment found in castles, usually created when there was a change of ownership or administration.
How did people go about cataloguing and describing all these things? How were rooms inspected – or which ones were not recorded? Which people were involved in these processes and how did they put the flood of equipment into words? – We understand inventories as historical texts that tell stories by naming objects and rooms. They provide valuable insights into everyday and social history, into actions, feelings, memories, knowledge and sensory experiences associated with objects.
A remarkable number of such inventories have been preserved for the castles in the historical region of Tyrol for the period from the 14th to the 16th century: 130 of these inventories are being processed with Transkribus, an AI-based platform for text recognition of historical manuscripts. Graphs then visualise the semantic modelling of the information. Our project thus opens up new ways of analysing inventories by making them accessible both in terms of content and material form.
On the one hand, the project provides insights into the practice of inventorying, the social significance of spaces and objects in castles, and the people associated with them, as well as the history of Tyrol. In addition, we are developing methods in the field of digital humanities and object and practice history that can also be applied outside Tyrol.

Annotation dargestellter Holzmaserungen mit der Software CVAT (Bildbeispiel: Grablegung Christi, Wien, ÖNB cod. 2738, fol. 27v, Foto: Universität Salzburg – IMAREAL).

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) this project aims to study paintings from the 14th and 15th centuries. The focus lies particularly on paintings in which materials and fabrics play a central role. On the basis of primary sources from the picture database REALonline machine recognitional techniques will be used to determine depicted material structures and surface qualities in book art and panel painting. These procedures enable analysis regarding the depicted material. Patterns and tendencies, but also special solutions, can be reognised in Big Data Corpora and their causalities can furthermore be studied using art historical methods.

Ansicht von Konstantinopel von der Seite von Pera, Frontispiz von Vivant Denon, Allgemeine Reise=Encyklopädie…, Bd. 4, Berlin: Salfeld 1822, ©Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

This interdisciplinary Digital Humanities project analyzes Ottoman “nature” in travelogues on the Ottoman empire, printed between 1501 and 1850.
The leading questions are what role representations of nature played in the reports, whether and, if so, why differences occurred in diachronic and synchronic perspectives, and how the texts and images related to each other. This analysis aims to shed new light on transnational environmental and natural history.

Bildausschnitt aus: Austausch der kaiserlichen und der osmanischen Großbotschaft bei Slankamen am 7. Dezember 1699, in: Gründ- und Umständlicher Bericht von denen Römisch-Kayserlichen wie auch Ottomannischen Groß-Bothschaften, Wien 1702. (c) Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München

QhoD is dedicated to producing critical digital editions of sources on Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy, covering the period from the inception of diplomatic relations between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries to the fall of both empires at the end of World War I. The QhoD project is inspired by recent culturological approaches to politics and the methodologies of “New Diplomatic History.” In its current phase, the project team focuses on editing all genres of textual and material sources documenting the grand embassy exchanges between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire during the early modern era. — Our platform welcomes external researchers and contributors interested in publishing their source editions as independent sub-projects.

Meister des Mornauer-Portraits: Herzog Sigismund von Österreich, genannt „der Münzreiche“ etwa 1465 – 1479, gemeinfrei (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sigismund_of_Tirol_(Alte_Pinakothek)_colour.jpg?uselang=de#Lizenz).

24 October 2027 marks the 600th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund, Prince of Tyrol and member of the Habsburg dynasty, also known as Sigmund the Coin-Rich (26 October 1427–4 March 1496). Sigmund was the son of Frederick IV of Tyrol (1382–1439) and his second wife Anna of Brunswick-Göttingen. Both his first marriage to Eleanor of Scotland and his second to Catherine of Saxony remained without heir apparent. He is well known in Tyrolean history, and his life and work have found their way into popular historical accounts.
Despite his importance for Tyrolean and Habsburg history, this Tyrolean prince has received little attention in research to date. Most of the information available is therefore based on superficial knowledge or very outdated publications that no longer meet current standards. His court in particular remains largely unexplored.
The planned project closes this research gap by drawing on the extensive source material and examining Sigmund’s court using approaches from recent court research and supporting technologies from the field of digital humanities.
These enable the existing sources to be processed in an economically and scientifically meaningful way, allowing them to be viewed and evaluated in their entirety or from a meta-perspective. Through automatic transcription, annotation and information extraction, a new, contemporary and efficient approach to the sources is being tested, offering new possibilities for insight.
The focus is on characterising Sigmund’s court on the basis of the people involved, the material and immaterial spaces used and created, the characteristic practices and the objects associated with them. In particular, it focuses on interactions and overlaps between the four categories of analysis: space, person, object and practice. The main focus is thus on the material and spatial conditions of the court and the question of how actors relate to and move within them.