VIRMA

In the Lower Austrian part of the Danube region, known as the Wachau, viticulture as an agrarian form of economy was established to a large extent by monastic estates. From the ninth century onwards at the latest, numerous monasteries in Austria, Salzburg, Bavaria, and Bohemia came into possession of vineyards in the Wachau by donation or purchase. Charters, urbaria, and tax lists document the importance of these mostly far-off properties from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Viticulture played a special role in this process. This is even more remarkable because the distances between the monastery and the estates – the so-called “Lesehöfe” – were sometimes considerable, for example, in the case of the Augustinian canons’ monasteries of Herrenchiemsee (Traunstein, Bavaria) and Höglwörth (Berchtesgaden, Bavaria) or the Benedictine monasteries of Prüfening (Regensburg, Bavaria) and Tegernsee (Miesbach, Bavaria) and the Hochstift Freising. These far-off estates served as an interface for the interests of both local and foreign actors, still visible today in the form of surviving buildings and historical documents and objects. As part of a project, the monastery estates and their historical documents were catalogued to establish a basis for an interdisciplinary analysis of the phenomenon. The essential goal of the project was to record the monastic estates as broadly as possible to create a basis for an interdisciplinary analysis of the phenomenon. Basic groundwork was laid to make the various estates available for the interests of cultural tourism within the Wachau World Heritage region.

Hohensalzburg Digital is a Digital Humanities project realized at Salzburg University and dedicated to digitally process and connect room- and object-related information taken from written sources and from building history data on Hohensalzburg Castle. Via digital interfaces, we create the basis for an Austrian Local Time Machine Project on the castle, a popular landmark. In three steps, the project opens up cultural heritage digitally for scientific community and international public alike: (1) The first part is dedicated to digital processing and exploring historical sources on rooms of the castle, their furnishings and function, from the earliest sources dating back to the sixteenth century until 1816 when Salzburg became part of the Habsburg Empire. (2) The second part connects the historical information deduced from the written sources with the results of building research and other work on realia, for example, on the famous tiled stove in the Goldene Stube (Golden Chamber). The digital room book created in this way allows a new comprehensive view on the development, furnishings, and use of the rooms and the whole building as a social space for the people who lived there. (3) The final part prepares the data for incorporation in the Europe Time Machine.

This article explores the potential of engaging the public in an ongoing interdisciplinary research project on castle inventories at the universities of Salzburg and Innsbruck. Our aim is to create a digital platform that uses inventories as a key to explore the living conditions in late medieval and early modern castles. In this article, we want to give an initial insight into the research project in terms of the theme of this volume: how the digital platform we are creating will contribute to engaging the public with material culture projects. We start from the hypothesis that inventories are neither objective nor simple lists of things, but products of an inventory practice, with traces of this activity, found both in the texts and in the materiality of the archival records. They contain a wealth of information on relations between things, people, activities, rooms, and the words used for them. We use digital methods of text recognition to interpret a corpus of 130 castle inventories from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in the historical region of Tyrol (Austria/Italy) as historical sources and on castles as social spaces. With ontological modelling and deduction from the archival records, we want to make the historical practice of creating inventories visible and use the information to explore everyday life at the castles. For selected castles, we will combine historical data with results from building history to create virtual room books. Digital tools will allow presenting the relations of objects, spaces, individuals, actions, and social practices and provide results for the scientific community as well as for the interested public.