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Network activities

Network members discussed their work on Late Medieval & Early Modern inventories at the international INVENTARIA conference (Sep 19th–20th 2024)

Over the last weeks Karoline Döring summarized the contributions of the network members Christina Antenhofer (Salzburg), Elisabeth Gruber (Salzburg/Krems) and Chiara Zuanni (Graz) at the INVENTARIA conference on this blog. The contributions of the associated members Thomas Pickles (Chester), Daniel Smail (Harvard) and Katherine Wilson (Chester) broadened this perspective on the work with Late Medieval and Early Modern inventories:

These blogposts were published:


For a summary of other contributions see:

Elisabeth Anna Tangerner, Tagungsbericht: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Perspectives and Challenges, in: H-Soz-Kult, 07.01.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-152044. (conference report)

Karoline Döring: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges. Projekttagung über den Einsatz digitaler Methoden zur Erschließung von europäischem Kulturerbe, 19.–20. September 2024 in Innsbruck, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 (general review).

Categories
Berichte

Chiara Zuanni, Exhibition Histories in 3D

Connecting Archives, Objects, and Narratives

Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Panel 5 3D Modelling

Museum exhibitions are temporary arrangements of objects curated around narratives, involving various actors, and are documented through archives, media, visitor books, and online content. Chiara Zuanni (Graz) explored in her paper the challenges and opportunities of using digital methods to reconstruct the histories that are created via these multimodal settings. Studying these histories reveal insights into museum practices, knowledge development, and public reception. They show how exhibition analysis moves from tracing histories of collectionism to uncovering histories of museums as institutions and their role as mediators of knowledge. However, current digital approaches are limited, often involving separate databases of digitized catalogues or disconnected 3D visualizations of museum spaces. The paper proposed an integrated method that links archival and visitor data with 3D models of museum galleries, creating “digital twins” of exhibitions therewith representing histories of curatorial practices and histories of knowledge.


Resources

Elisabeth Anna Tangerner, Tagungsbericht: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Perspectives and Challenges, in: H-Soz-Kult, 07.01.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-152044. (conference report)

Karoline Döring: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges. Projekttagung über den Einsatz digitaler Methoden zur Erschließung von europäischem Kulturerbe, 19.–20. September 2024 in Innsbruck, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 (general review).

For further information see the conference website.

Categories
Topics

Entangled in Virtuality – The Triggering Effect of Materialized History

Returning Materiality 

In recent years the engagement with materiality has gained increasing attention in history education in German speaking countries, surpassing the level of interest observed several decades ago. Notably, this development extends beyond the mere integration of material sources to history education in schools or museums (Must/Buchsteiner 2021). It also includes previously overlooked forms of historical representation and appropriation through objects as part of historical culture (Barsch/van Norden 2020; Mathis/Barsch 2022; Kühberger 2024a). In this context, ‘Geschichtsdinge’ (“materialized history”; literally “history things”) have come into sharper focus. These are understood as “various manifestations of historical culture that are inscribed either with a reference to the past or an interpretation of the past” (Kühberger 2023, 64). Examples include plastic Viking figurines, board games about the Ottoman Empire, toy sabers, or children’s books about Baroque princesses. In recent years, research in history education on the integration of such ‘Geschichtsdinge’ into the everyday lives of children and adolescents has prompted not only the exploration of various categories of toys (Kühberger 2021a; Erhard 2021), but also ethnographic studies on their availability and use in children’s play spaces (Kühberger 2021b; Kühberger 2024b; Kühberger 2025).

Categories
Berichte

Elisabeth Gruber & Peter Färberböck, Walking on the Path of Inventories

Using RDF, LOD, LLM Technologies for Object-related Sources 

Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Panel 4 Processing Data 

The IMAREAL database Raumordnungen relates objects to spaces, people and actions in late medieval and early modern times. It was developed to digitally model the complex spatial-object relations documented in the sources. The research tool ITEM, developed from the Raumordnungen project and based on the data structure of REALonline, enables the integrated search of different types of written sources such as account books and inventories, as Elisabeth Gruber (Salzburg/Krems) and Peter Färberböck (Salzburg/Krems) described in their presentation. ITEM relies on graph data in RDF format and tries to contextualize it with relevant information by using complex AI models such as large language models. On the one hand, this approach offers potential for the structured, interoperable indexing of objects. However, the added value is even greater if large quantities of data and medieval research projects are combined via this interface to create a semantic web of data relating to material objects and promote data-driven research into medieval life and its everyday culture.


Resources & Tools 

Elisabeth Anna Tangerner, Tagungsbericht: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Perspectives and Challenges, in: H-Soz-Kult, 07.01.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-152044. (conference report) 

Karoline Döring: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges. Projekttagung über den Einsatz digitaler Methoden zur Erschließung von europäischem Kulturerbe, 19.–20. September 2024 in Innsbruck, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 (general review). 

 For further information see the conference website. 

Categories
Berichte

Thomas Pickles, Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES)

Reconstructing Early Medieval Churches in Schools 

Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Panel 3 Reconstructing the Past 

Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES) is a project developing a digital platform with a database, online exhibition and teaching materials on churches in Great Britain and Ireland before 1100 A.D. It is part of the larger Corpus Architecturae Religiosae Europae (CARE)-initiative. Thomas Pickles (Chester) examined in his paper the opportunities and challenges of digital reconstructions in the classroom, presented the web resource and the teaching materials developed from it and reflected on the relationship between the historical past and its digital recreation in the school context. With a clear mission of engaging educational stakeholders the researchers in this project co-created together with school teachers model course syllabi and study materials for schools. The research questions relied on textual, physical and onomastic evidence to allow the project members to get a clearer picture of how many types of churches existed, what their defining characteristics were, what chronology of church building and what regional patterns existed and whether these are genuine patterns or a result of a bias produced by the surviving evidence. Offering answers and bringing new source corpora of buildings, sculptures and names to the classrooms ECCLES makes the past accessible to pupils and is engaged on the crossroads of open education and open science.


Resources & Tools 

  • Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES) 
  • Corpus Architecturae Religiosae Europae (CARE)

    Elisabeth Anna Tangerner, Tagungsbericht: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Perspectives and Challenges, in: H-Soz-Kult, 07.01.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-152044. (conference report)

    Karoline Döring: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges. Projekttagung über den Einsatz digitaler Methoden zur Erschließung von europäischem Kulturerbe, 19.–20. September 2024 in Innsbruck, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 (general review).

    For further information see the conference website.

Categories
Berichte

Katherine Wilson, Challenges & Opportunities of Reconstructing the Past for the Present

Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries 1000–1700  

Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Panel 3 Reconstructing the Past 

The research project Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries 1000–1700 (MOB) is an interdisciplinary study of the changes in objects and their use in Western Europe between 1000 and 1700. The focus is on the mobility of objects to better understand both local and global exchange processes. The first part of the project used medieval everyday objects from the Grosvenor Museum in Chester to analyze the effects of economic and cultural upheavals on material culture. 

The second part of the project is dedicated to communicating these research findings to the public. It focuses on digital approaches such as virtual reconstructions of medieval buildings in Chester, VR models and a new museum database for research and crowdsourcing. Katherine Wilson (Chester) emphasized that digital methods not only enrich science but can also positively influence local cultures and economies. They contribute to making the past accessible, even tangible. Aligning with the principles of open education the project offers various resources such as education object boxes for schools and “handling workshops” in the museum, enabling pupils and visitors to feel and experience the physicality of historical objects and form their own ideas about them. 

Behind this is the desire to generate social impact with scientific research and change ideas of the public about the objects. Wilson underlined in her paper that research should not only be presented to the public but must be developed co-creatively with social actors from the outset. 


Resources & Tools 

Elisabeth Anna Tangerner, Tagungsbericht: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Perspectives and Challenges, in: H-Soz-Kult, 07.01.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-152044 (conference report). 

Karoline Döring: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges. Projekttagung über den Einsatz digitaler Methoden zur Erschließung von europäischem Kulturerbe, 19.–20. September 2024 in Innsbruck, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 (general review)

For further information see the conference website. 

Categories
Berichte

Christina Antenhofer, Barbara Denicolò & Elisabeth Tangerner, How to Record Spaces and Objects

Tracing the Social Practice of Inventorying Using The Example of Tyrolean Castle Inventories

Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Panel 1 Working on Inventories

This paper presents a central topic of the research project INVENTARIA (FWF P 35988), whose project members initiated the joint conference with VIRMA. The project focuses on inventories from Tyrolean castles in the 15th and 16th centuries. The emphasis is not only on  the recorded objects and spaces, but on the practice of inventorying as a historical and social process. Inventories are understood not as objective lists, but as cultural products that bear traces of their creation both in their textual and material form. In their paper, Christina Antenhofer, Barbara Denicolò and Elisabeth Tangerner (Salzburg) pursued very pragmatic questions to reconstruct the complex process of inventorying. They showed that a great amount of information can be collected from the surviving documents, the textual and material aspects of the inventories, which is not limited to the number and type of objects recorded. The speakers highlighted how digital methods like semantic annotation, (meta)data enrichment and data analysis help to retrace and visualise the complex practices of inventorying. These methods enable them to trace the actors involved, shed light on the procedures used to record rooms and objects, and help to clarify the purpose and function of the respective inventories. Through an event-centered and source-critical comparison of these records and a mindful modelling of this knowledge in the framework of CIDOC CRM the project-team detects both distinctive characteristics and overarching patterns in the recording of historical objects and related rooms in a central geographical region of Late Medieval Europe in a period of over two centuries.


Resources & Tools


Elisabeth Anna Tangerner, Tagungsbericht: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Perspectives and Challenges, in: H-Soz-Kult, 07.01.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-152044. (conference report)

Karoline Döring: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges. Projekttagung über den Einsatz digitaler Methoden zur Erschließung von europäischem Kulturerbe, 19.–20. September 2024 in Innsbruck, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 (general review).

Antenhofer, Christina, Gruber-Tokić, Elisabeth, Hiebel, Gerald, Matschinegg, Ingrid, Posch, Claudia and Rampl, Gerhard. “Inventories as Keys to Exploring Castles as Cultural Heritage”, Open Archaeology, vol. 11, no. 1, 2025, pp. 20240026. https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2024-0026

For further information see the conference website.

Categories
Berichte

Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage

Perspectives and Challenges

Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Open Panel Discussion

The open panel discussion dealt with digital access to cultural heritage and brought together five experts from humanities research, museum studies and cultural administration. Daniel Smail (Harvard) emphasized the need for an open infrastructure for accessing research data. Chiara Zuanni (Graz) pointed out the important coordination work between academic institutions and memory institutions for joint research into cultural heritage. Bernhard Heil (Salzburg) highlighted the use of digital offerings in exhibitions as an important field of activity for contemporary curating. Ulrike Tanzer (Innsbruck) emphasized the political and infrastructural challenges in dealing with cultural heritage in the digital age. Günter Mühlberger (Innsbruck) criticized the still hesitant use of digital methods in the humanities and cultural studies despite having very mature AI models and proven computer-aided processes at their disposal and called for more openness, interdisciplinarity and support in the specialist communities. Christina Antenhofer (Salzburg) emphasized the need to set up digital help desks at universities to support research and teaching.

Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage 2024-Plakat; © Schloss Runkelstein (BZ/IT) | Grafik Cornelia Paris

Resources & Tools

  • DALME (Documentary Archeology of Late Medieval Europe) – platform to researching digitized inventories from the Late Middle Ages
  • Transkribus – AI powered platform for handwritten text recognition of historical documents
  • DHInfra.at – cross-institutional project to build an infrastructure in Austria, that connects tools, documentation, and resources for the Digital Humanities

Elisabeth Anna Tangerner, Tagungsbericht: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Perspectives and Challenges, in: H-Soz-Kult, 07.01.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-152044. (conference report)

Karoline Döring: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges. Projekttagung über den Einsatz digitaler Methoden zur Erschließung von europäischem Kulturerbe, 19.–20. September 2024 in Innsbruck, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 (general review).

For further information see the conference website.

A German version of this text was published as part of the general overview by Karoline Döring; see https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 

Categories
Berichte

Christina Antenhofer, Barbara Denicolò & Elisabeth Tangerner, Scurrilities, Gossip and Storytelling.

The Narrative and Fictional Potential of Late Medieval Castle Inventories

Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Keynote 2

Objects tell stories. The idea and principles of storytelling known from journalism can be used very effectively as a theoretical approach for researching inventories. Even more so in combination with digital methods. Christina Antenhofer, Barbara Denicolò and Elisabeth Tangerner (Salzburg) impressively described how semantic annotation and 3D modeling of the extracted data together with the preparation and presentation of the information from the inventories from a storytelling angle enhance the narrative potential of non-narrative sources. Thus, little stories, gossip, personal comments about people and their actions and many other things in a castle, that usually do not prompt scholarly interest, are discovered. They unfold into micro and macro stories about the castle as a social space.

Ausschnitt aus Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage 2024-Plakat; © Schloss Runkelstein (BZ/IT) | Grafik Cornelia Paris

Resources & Tools

  • Transkribus – AI powered platform for handwritten text recognition of historical documents
  • CIDOC CRM – standard for high level information retrieval & information modelling

Elisabeth Anna Tangerner, Tagungsbericht: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Perspectives and Challenges, in: H-Soz-Kult, 07.01.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-152044. (conference report)

Karoline Döring: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges. Projekttagung über den Einsatz digitaler Methoden zur Erschließung von europäischem Kulturerbe, 19.–20. September 2024 in Innsbruck, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 (general review).

For further information see the conference website.

A German version of this text was published as part of the general overview by Karoline Döring; see https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7

Categories
Berichte

Daniel Smail, The Imagined Space of the Late Medieval Household

 

Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Keynote 1

In his reflections on the spatial dimensions of inventories, Daniel Smail (Harvard) presented the collaborative and interdisciplinary project DALME (Documentary Archeology of Late Medieval Europe). It is a partner of the network and, like the much larger Europeana initiative, dedicated to the basic idea of making cultural heritage accessible to scholars and the public. DALME offers an online platform with digitized collections of inventories. The information obtained from the inventories is processed there for various search requirements and research interests, which in turn enable comparisons of the material equipment of European households across different regions and time periods. The platform pursues a decidedly open approach and invites researchers and institutions to make their material accessible.

Ausschnitt aus Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage 2024-Plakat; © Schloss Runkelstein (BZ/IT) | Grafik Cornelia Paris

Resources & Tools

Elisabeth Anna Tangerner, Tagungsbericht: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Perspectives and Challenges, in: H-Soz-Kult, 07.01.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-152044. (conference report)

Karoline Döring: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges. Projekttagung über den Einsatz digitaler Methoden zur Erschließung von europäischem Kulturerbe, 19.–20. September 2024 in Innsbruck, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 (general review).

For further information see the conference website.