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.

---

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• Transkribus – AI powered platform for handwritten text recognition of historical documents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

---

---