DiDip at DHd2024 – a minimal report

From February 26 to March 1 2024, a part of DiDip attended the Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum (DHd2024) in Passau, Germany, where we presented a poster on XML schema transformation flows and, related to this, semi-automatic inventorization techniques.

Our work (and data) famously builds on the Charters Encoding Initiative (CEI), aimed at standardizing how charters are digitally encoded. We point out some limitations and drawbacks of it, and suggest a possible transformation workflow to an adapted TEI-P5. As such, we propose an iterative workflow that ensures the data is accurately and fully transferred. The innovation mostly lies in informing the creation of a new schema through data-driven analyses of an encoded charter corpus, which greatly alleviates the digital editing process. Gladly, the feedback we received on site bolsters our belief that the workflow and its tools are well-generalizable to other projects, and it pushes us harder to publish a more modular version in the near future!

Especially interesting to DiDip’s work, we highlight: a poster by Alina Ostrowski, who presented a range of text reuse methods for analyzing historical documents; a talk by Andreas Kuczera, who also demonstrated the use of a graph-database to enable querying over 200,000 Regesta Imperii abstracts; a talk by Piroska Lendvai & Claudia Wick with an update on their work that is focused on leveraging dictionaries to fine-tune Latin BERT models.