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.

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Resources & Tools

• Transkribus – AI powered platform for handwritten text recognition of historical documents
• CIDOC CRM – standard for high level information retrieval & information modelling
• Project website: https://www.inventaria.at/

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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.

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