The Imperial Diet of Regensburg of 1576 - a Pilot Project on the Digital Edition of Sources

The proposed project completes the editorial project Reichstagsakten: Reichsversammlungen, 15561662 (Imperial Diet Records: Imperial Assemblies, 15561662) sponsored by the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of the Sciences and Humanities. Since 1988, this project has overseen the editing of source material covering eleven imperial assemblies and the publication of fifteen sub-volumes (approx. 10,800 pages). The proposed edition of the sources on the Imperial Diet of Regensburg of 1576 would complete the documentation of all the imperial diets which met during the era in the empires history which may be characterized as the period of successful religious peace (15561586). With their editorial project on the Imperial Diet Records, the division acted as a pioneer in taking advantage of the opportunities presented by new digital media and publishing records of the imperial diet of 1556/57 not only in print, but also online. The proposed new project intends to further develop this practice by editing a comprehensive collection of key documents covering an era in the empires history which may be characterized as the period of the so-called working religious peace (funktionierender Religionsfriede). This is a valuable end in and of itself, but the proposed project further aims to develop new insights into questions of how to confront the challenges presented by a digital edition of early modern sources. Digital editions are advantageous in that they provide a more flexible means of cataloguing historical texts and offer better accessibility than the print medium ever could. Additionally, they provide means for data modelling considering various research questions, computation of the encoded data, as well as interoperability and interchange of data sets from and to archives and libraries. Finally, the project can draw on the data standardization activities in the Digital Humanities community: Annotation of transcripts and description in XML/TEI is oriented towards long-term availability, offers useful methods to create links to structured resources with the help of RDF and ontologies, and allows the extraction of highly structured data. It will be used to represent the instances of communication documented in the source texts and will allow an automatic analysis and presentation of all communicative acts. The project drives on the international cooperation between experts in both the fields of modern history (Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften) and the Digital Humanities (Karl- Franzens-Universität Graz).

Parliamentarism has predecessors in the Early Modern period (1500-1800) also on the European continent. In the Holy Roman Empire the Imperial Diets discussed the major political issues of the Empire since the end of the 15th century. The Historische Kommission in Munich has dedicated itself to make the records of theses assemblies available to scholarly historical research and to the general public. The Project had the goal to bring this editorial tradition into the 21st century. Scholarly editing with digital methods has developed a rich set of methods that could convert the editorial practises useful for the Imperial Diets as well. The project has succeeded in this by making the new edition available at https://gams.uni-graz.at/context:rta1576. This digital scholarly edition is hosted in a long-term oriented infrastructure (the so-called Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management System GAMS of the University of Graz) according to best practices in the Digital Humanities. This edition has enhanced the existing methods of scholarly editing of pre-modern parliamentary assemblies in three fields: 1. The earlier printed editions had to exclude documentation of archival records relevant for the project by the reason of printing costs. The digital edition can overcome this restriction and adds records on important aspects of the event. The result of this is a set of archival descriptions using controlled vocabularies applicable to similar assemblies and referencing established archival description models (Encoded Archival Description EAD) 2. The digital edition can represent the texts in a much more detailed way by means of the established text encoding standard of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The encoding includes rich documentation of palaeographical phenomena, comparing variants of the texts, and explanatory annotation. All of these are represented in a feature-rich user interface at https://gams.uni-graz.at/context.rta1576.ed 3. The digital scholarly edition applies cutting edge methods to represent also content of the texts in a database prepared for the W3C "Semantic Web". It uses linked data methods to make person and places mentioned identifiable and connect them with other data sources. It has created a data model re-usable by other pre-modern parliamentary assemblies, the "Premodern PArliamentary Communication" ontology (PPAC). This model has attracted interest by a European community working on similar subjects in an international conference in April 2022 (https://reichstagsakten-1576.uni-graz.at/de/konferenz-2022/). The technologies are used to created rich indices and search interfaces (https://gams.uni-graz.at/o:rta1576.bt1734r15t) The digital scholarly edition can be considered a prototype how to continue with the remaining editions of the remaining records from Imperial Diets and can be used as a reference how to convert existing printed editions (https://reichstagsakten.de) in a digital format going beyond mimicking the pages of former printed editions.