Category Archives: Project presentations

Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies

The foundation supported over several years until 2007 research and online collaboration on the culture and history of the indigenous population groups in Central America – who are today ethnical minorities – until the first European contacts in 1519:

Continue reading Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies

The Medieval Archive of Romania – historical collections of the German and Hungarian minorities

The National Archives of Romania conducted with support from the National Archives of Norway and the EEA Grants the successful initiation of the “Medieval Archive of Romania“. This digital archive aims at digitizing in the next years all collections of medieval materials on the territory of Romania. Included are also several collections belonging to the national minorities like the Transylvanian Saxons and the Hungarians respectively Szekely people. Currently a few thousand images are accessible. The scans are overall performed in good, but not excellent quality; substantial metadata is provided. The user interface is also available in English, Hungarian and German. However the registers are currently only in Romanian, thus making research for foreigners more difficult. The project in total is surely a huge step forward for the digitization of the cultural heritage on the territory of Romania but will need continous funding in order to attain its objectives.

Digitized materials on the Aleutian people

The Museum of the Aleutians in Unalaska/AK and Alaska’s Digital Archives are currently working on freely providing collections of digitized photographies on the ethnical group of the Aleutians:

http://www.aleutians.org/research.html

Due to the comparatively high reception of the culture and history of the Aleutians by Russians as well as Americans, the digitization of “Aleutica” is very promising and will undoubtedly mark an important contribution to increasing publicity for this in many ways unique minority.

“Saxonica” – digitization project on the history of daily life of the Transylvanian Saxons

With support of the Institute for German Culture and History in Southeastern Europe (Munich/Germany, www.ikgs.de) a group of young historians from Germany and Romania is seeking to document the daily life of the German minority in Transylvania in the 20th century. The team will interview members of the minority in an oral history approach and search for personal materials like diaries and private letters which are suitable for digitization. Continue reading “Saxonica” – digitization project on the history of daily life of the Transylvanian Saxons

Online Bibliography on German-language periodicals from Eastern Europe

In order to provide for the first time a complete overview and compilation of the German-language press from Eastern Europe, I started in 2012 to collect all available bibliographical data on newspapers, journals, popular calendars, almanachs and yearbooks which were published by members of German-language minorities in this part of the continent. Continue reading Online Bibliography on German-language periodicals from Eastern Europe

Online Lexicon on the Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe

Providing referenced knowledge on minorities is the basis for future research progress and consequently for a successful, substantial cultural preservation – notably in the internet, where a considerable or even the biggest part of information is procured. Relying on the Wikipedia is not a viable solution: it is a huge platform for information with a strong mobilisation for crowdsourcing, but it still has many gaps and several flaws and is due to the lack of a scientific quality control not quotable. Especially regarding minorities the quality problem is quite severe: the Wikipedia articles on them are either written by authors who have limited knowledge of the culture and history of the respective minorities – mistakes or outdated theses are a common occurrence – or they are part of these and therefore influencing in a subjective, sometimes manipulative way the presented theses and perspectives. For solving this issue there are two possibilities: 1) digitizing older printed publications with referenced knowledge; 2) compose new ones. Continue reading Online Lexicon on the Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe

The Baltic Biographical Lexicon – digitization project of the Baltic History Commission

Based on the printed German-Baltic Biographical Lexicon the Baltic History Commission conducted the buildup of a database which contains all OCR-processed texts and scanned images from the lexicon as well as detailed metadata:  Continue reading The Baltic Biographical Lexicon – digitization project of the Baltic History Commission

Online Document Book on the History of the Germans in Transylvania (1185 – 1531)

Funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (Bundesbeauftragte für Kultur und Medien)  the “Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte der Deutschen in Siebenbürgen”, originally published in a print edition in 7 volumes from 1892-1991, was digitized and converted into a freely accessible database: Continue reading Online Document Book on the History of the Germans in Transylvania (1185 – 1531)

Digitization project on textual materials of Finno-Ugric population groups

The National Library of Finland is conducting since 2012 until late 2016 a major digitization project on the cultural heritage of Finno-Ugric minorities:

“The project will produce digitized materials in the Uralic languages as well as their development tools to support linguistic research and citizen science. The resulting materials will constitute the largest resource for the Uralic languages in the world. Through this project, researchers will gain access to corpora which they have not been able to study before and to which all users will have open access regardless of their place of residence.” Continue reading Digitization project on textual materials of Finno-Ugric population groups

RomArchive – digital archive of the arts of the Roma

Finally a major and promising digitization project on cultural materials of Roma minorities receives substantial funding:

“The German Federal Cultural Foundation [Kulturstiftung des Bundes] supports the establishment of a digital archive of the arts of the Roma. RomArchive is to become an internationally accessible space that makes the cultures and histories of the Roma visible. From 2015 to 2019, an international collection of art from all disciplines will be gathered, enhanced by scholarly texts and historical documents and accompanied by a programme of educational and cultural events. Each section of RomArchive will have its own expert team of curators, responsible for that section’s contents. RomArchive makes no claims to completeness, but sees itself as a continuously growing platform featuring representative collections. With its curated contents, modern storytelling, and intelligent contextualisation, RomArchive differs from static databases in both aesthetics and methodology.” Continue reading RomArchive – digital archive of the arts of the Roma

Digitization project on German-language Jewish periodicals from Eastern Europe

The Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS, Regensburg/Germany) is conducting a 12-month project for the digitization of 45 Jewish German-language newspapers, popular calendars and yearbooks from Eastern Europe, published in the time period of 1863 to 1940. Continue reading Digitization project on German-language Jewish periodicals from Eastern Europe