Grand Tour digital. Digitization, indexing, and visualization of early modern egodocuments of educational travels using semi-automated editorial methods.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Peter Burschel
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 469982284

Grand Tour digital.Digitization, indexing, and visualization of early modern egodocuments of educational travels using semi-automated editorial methods.Early modern educational travels like the Grand Tour formed as a rite de passage an important stage in the personal development of members of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, to which many reports and diaries testify. The particular but as yet unexplored significance for the study of egodocuments lies in the fact that in this genre the experience of difference by the travellers is described and evaluated to a lesser degree as strangeness, but foremost in a way of successful appropriation of the foreign experience and environment. In the focus of this project are 24 mainly German travelogues (ca. 10.300 pages) written between 1550 and 1770 by young noble as well as bourgeois men, which are held at the Herzog August Library (HAB) for the smaller part at the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Wolfenbüttel. All Grand Tour-diaries will be digitized and indexed using metadata. Furthermore, five diaries, one of them with three copies, will be semi-automatically transcribed and encoded according to the TEI-XML-Standard using the software Transkribus, annotated via named entity recognition and visualized by developing a cartographical presentation which links text and traveling route.In doing so, a new standard model will be established, publicly documented and, together with the texts and the research data, made accessible on a long-term basis through the online egodocument research portal and the GitLab-server of the HAB to ensure free reusability.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Thomas Mandl