The Mediality of Diplomatic Communication (17th Century)

Politics is shaped by the modern media society. Therefore it consists not only of objective argumentation but has to be staged and communicated in an appealing way in the media. This media imprint of politics is, at the present, more intensive than ever, however not new in its core, as it is based on communication. And again communication bases on media. The research project examines the communication of Habsburg diplomats in Constantinople with the Imperial Court in Vienna. The knowledge held about the Ottomans in the Holy Roman Empire and by the Habsburg Monarchy originated mainly in diplomacy. The two most important media are in the focus of attention: on the one hand the letters of the envoys which have received little attention in research so far. In the letters information about political negotiations as well as detailed accounts about the life in the city, the culture and society of the Ottomans are included. On the other hand travel reports, which were written during diplomatic missions, are examined. The focus lies on a virtually unknown travelogue, which was written in 1650 and was lost in the turmoil of World War II. Fortunately, an old microfilm was discovered, which was digitally restored, so that the text can be read with the help of picture-editing programs. The letters of the diplomats and their travel reports are analyzed from the perspective of media studies and are compared with each other. Modern methods of computer based text analysis are used. Starting point is the assumption that media construct reality in a certain manner: the television other than daily newspapers or the radio, letters other than travel reports. Taken to the extreme, media can be understood as active agents that follow their own patterns of behavior. On these preliminary considerations lies the basic thesis of this project, namely that the information and knowledge transfer that took place between diplomats and the Imperial Court was primarily shaped by the media: what the people know about the Ottomans was dependent on the underlying rules of the media. The project leads to a deeper understanding of the construction of knowledge of the Ottomans. It also provides an insight into the historical dimensions of transculturality and related topical problems such as dealing with otherness and the relationship between Christians and Muslims. Media not only write their own history, but also influence history: The results of the research project are therefore of relevance to the understanding of the Habsburg-Ottoman relations and the 17th century international politics in general.

This project focused on German language travelogues in the collections of the Austrian National Library (1500 to 1876). To analyze perceptions of "the other" and "the Orient" (Ottoman Empire, Persia) in a large-scale text corpus, algorithms for the semi-automatized search for, and evaluation of, digitally available texts were being created. Scientists from the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies (IHB) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), the Department of History of the University of Salzburg, the Austrian National Library (ÖNB), and the German research partner, the research center L3S at the University of Hannover. Results: 1. The project team identified almost 5,000 travelogues in the digital and analogous holdings of the ÖNB. Based on title and keyword searches, the team semi-automatically created sets of likely travelogues that were sorted out manually. By applying these algorithms, the team identified further travelogues, many of which had previously been unknown to the research community. This result is of high importance, because the method is absolutely new and proved the usability of mashine learning in the identification of specific types of texts, even if the conversion of the text into machine-encoded text (OCR) is of poor quality. For this, the project was rewarded with the Lee Dirks Award for Best Full Paper. In the meantime, other projects already tried and applied this method. 2. As another result the project secured a large amount of European cultural heritage since it created the largest corpus of (German language) travelogues ever. The largest part of the sources is now digitally accessible to the research communities of the humanities and the computer sciences via a search marker in the online library catalog of the ÖNB. 3. The metadata, that have been checked intellectually and have been created, improves the visibility, and explorational potentials regarding the text corpus for the humanities and the computer sciences. 5. We successfully identified identical text passages ("text reuse") of the travelogues on the "Orient" by applying BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), an algorithm originally established in the field of bioinformatics for fast DNA sequence alignment. The results are promising, but show, however, that the OCR quality is decisive and that ways to balance out different spellings, synonyms and verbal variations of the same and similar content need to be tackled in future research on the topic. 6. The semi-automated identification of perceptions of "otherness" proved to be currently not as feasible as hoped (reasons: heterogeneity of the corpus; great need for "ground truth" for machine learning; insufficient OCR quality). However, related questions have been addressed using classical humanities methods as part of a collected volume, that will be published in 2022.