Das Wien[n]erische Diarium: A digital data treasury for the humanities

Since its foundation in 1703, the Wien[n]erisches Diarium (today: Wiener Zeitung) has been archived continually and is fully available as a body of sources. Facilitating its use in a digital environment is of great scholarly interest to a number of disciplines within the humanities: media history, art history, music history, literary studies, ceremonial studies, onomastics, and historical linguistics are just some of the fields that may benefit from the collection. This go!digital project therefore proposes to work closely with researchers from all these fields in order to determine joint priorities and aspects of particular relevance in preparing the sources for digital use.

In the course of this project, a few hundred issues of the Wien[n]erisches Diarium – published over the course of the 18th century – will be digitized in their entirety. In spring 2017, an electronic call for nominations, which was promoted via digital channels and published in the print version of the Wiener Zeitung, provided an opportunity for scholars of various disciplines, to nominate specific issues or sets of issues for the shortlist.

A review of the nominations received has shown how broad a spectrum of topics they cover: From births and baptisms, birthdays and Saint’s days, coronations and hereditary hommages for crowned sovereigns, to deaths, funerals, executions and catastrophes. Other events covered in the issues recommended are religious and secular festivities, announcements, openings and inaugurations as well as famous guests’ visits to the capital. Coverage of notable achievements in the broadest sense of the word – such as the Declaration of Human Rights or the beginning of aviation – have likewise been included in the selection, as has the immanent topic of publishing in the Wien[n]erisches Diarium (Wiener Zeitung).

A number of additions which the project team ended up making were therefore not so much due to a necessity to complete the thematic range, but aimed at closing up larger temporal gaps. In order to be able to accurately and thoroughly document the Wien[n]erisches Diarium (Wiener Zeitung) in a continuous, chronological manner, the project team ultimately decided to include five representative issues from each year (as far as they had been digitized by ANNO). Taking into account the development of the Wien[n]erisches Diarium (Wiener Zeitung) into a newspaper in the modern sense, it was attempted to create a reference corpus that showcases the turns and upheavals of a period of radical political, social, scientific and artistic change in the 18th century.

The ‘reporting tool’ below provides information about the selected issues and allows users to track the project’s daily progress online:


The project headquarters are located at the ACDH-CH, a department of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW); the creation of the full text versions and the enrichment of the data is carried out in cooperation with the ÖAW’s Institute for History of Art and Musicology (contact: Anna Mader-Kratky), the University of Innsbruck's work group for Digitization and Digital Preservation (contact: Günter Mühlberger) as well as further cooperation partners and the Wiener Zeitung.

In 2016, a pilot study was carried out in preparation for this project, the results of which were presented at a workshop.



Publications

  • Rastinger, Nina C., and Claudia Resch. 2023. Darstellungs- und Deutungsmuster von Naturkatastrophen im 18. Jahrhundert. Korpusbasierte Erkenntnisse aus der digitalen Wiener Zeitung.. Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte 25: 103-126.
  • Resch, Claudia. 2023. Volltextoptimierung für die historische Wiener Zeitung mit einem Anwendungsszenario aus der germanistischen Sprachgeschichte. In Digitised Newspapers – A New Eldorado for Historians? Reflections on Tools, Methods and Epistemology. Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics 3, eds. E. Bunout, Clavert, F., and Ehrmann, M., 89-111. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110729214.
  • Fischer, Nora, Nina Claudia Rastinger, and Claudia Resch. 2021. Intertextuelle Relationen in der Zeitungslandschaft des 18. Jahrhunderts: Close und Distant Reading von Ausgaben der Wiener und Preßburger Zeitung. Hungarian Studies: 1–29. doi:10.1556/044.2021.00155.
  • Rastinger, Nina Claudia. 2021. Drucktypenwechsel als Hervorhebungspraxis historischer Zeitungen. Eine korpuslinguistische Untersuchung am Beispiel des Gebrauchs von Antiqua und Fraktur im Wien[n]erischen Diarium. Jahrbuch für Germanistische Sprachgeschichte 12: 71-90. doi:10.1515/jbgsg-2021-0006.
  • Rastinger, Nina Claudia. 2021. Volltextsuche. Helmut W. Klug. KONDE Weißbuch.
  • Resch, Claudia, and Dario Kampkaspar, eds. 2020. Wienerisches DIGITARIUM - Digitale Ausgabe des "Wien[n]erischen Diarium" (322 Ausgaben im Volltext).
  • Mader-Kratky, Anna, Claudia Resch, and Martin Scheutz. 2019. Das Wien[n]erische Diarium im 18. Jahrhundert. Neue Sichtweisen auf ein Periodikum im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung.. Wiener Geschichtsblätter. Das Wien[n]erische Diarium im 18. Jahrhundert - Digitale Erschließung und neue Perspektiven (Teil I). Nach einem Konzept von Anna Mader Kratky, Claudia Resch und Martin Scheutz.: 93-113.
  • Resch, Claudia. 2019. Das Wien[n]erische Diarium und seine digitale Erschließung oder "Was Zeitungsleser vor Geräte haben müssen?". Wiener Geschichtsblätter. Das Wien[n]erische Diarium im 18. Jahrhundert - Digitale Erschließung und neue Perspektiven (Teil I). Nach einem Konzept von Anna Mader Kratky, Claudia Resch und Martin Scheutz.: 115-129.
  • Resch, Claudia, and Dario Kampkaspar. 2019. DIGITARIUM - Unlocking the Treasure Trove of 18th-Centrury Newspapers for Digital Times. In Das Achtzehnte Jarhhundert und Österreich. Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des Achtzehnten Jahrhunderts.Achtzehntes Jahrhundert digital: Zentraleuropäische Perspektiven, eds. T. Wallnig, Romberg, M., and Weis, J., 34:49-64.
  • Resch, Claudia. 2018. „Zeitungs Lust und Nutz“ im digitalen Zeitalter. Partizipative Ansätze zur Erschließung historischer Ausgaben der Wiener Zeitung. medien & zeit. Kommunikation in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart 2/2018: 20-31.
  • Resch, Claudia. 2018. Historische Zeitungen im digitalen Medium. In Germanistik digital: Digital Humanities in der Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, eds. I. Börner, Straub, W., and Zolles, C., 183-198. Wien: Facultas.
  • Resch, Claudia, Dario Kampkaspar, Daniela Fasching, Vanessa Hannesschläger, and Daniel Schopper. 2018. Building a Community Driven Corpus of Historical Newspapers. Jonathan Girón Palau and Russel, Isabel Galina. Digital Humanities 2018. Puentes - Bridges. Book of Abstracts / Libro de resúmenes. Mexico City: Red de Humanidades Digitales A. C.
  • Resch, Claudia, Dario Kampkaspar, and Daniel Schopper. 2018. Historische Zeitungen kollaborativ erschließen: Die älteste, noch erscheinende Tageszeitung der Welt "under annotation". Georg Vogeler. Kritik der digitalen Vernunft DHd 2018 Köln. 5. Tagung des Verbands Digital Humanities in deutschsprachigen Raum e.V. Konferenzabstracts.
  • Kampkaspar, Dario, Daniel Schopper, and Claudia Resch. 2017. Wiennerisches Diarium Digital: Involving users in scholarly annotation. TEI 2017 - Book of Abstracts. Victoria.
  • Resch, Claudia, Daniel Schopper, Vanessa Hannesschläger, Eva Wohlfarter, Anna Mader-Kratky, and Nora Fischer. 2016. Wienerisches Diarium Digital: Unlocking a historic newspaper for interdisciplinary studies with the TEI Guidelines. Claudia Resch, Hannesschläger, Vanessa, and Wissik, Tanja. TEI conference and members´ meeting 2016. Book of Abstracts. Vienna.
  • Rastinger, Nina Claudia. Drucktypenwechsel als Hervorhebungspraxis historischer Zeitungen. Eine korpuslinguistische Analyse des Gebrauchs von Antiqua und Fraktur am Beispiel des Wien[n]erischen Diariums und des Hamburgischen Correspondenten. Wien: Universität Wien.

Contact

Claudia Resch (PI)
Dario Kampkaspar
Daniel Schopper


Project duration

01 March 2017 – 28 February 2020




Twitter Hashtag

#digitarium