We are pleased to announce the publication of the platform “Repertorium Saracenorum” as a result of the long-standing collaboration between the Department of Medieval History at the University of Bonn and the Cologne Center for eHumanities.
The Repertorium Saracenorum goes back to the DFG-funded project “Saraceni, Agareni, Mauri, … in Latin-Christian sources of the 7th to 11th centuries” carried out at the University of Bonn between 2013-2017 under the direction of Prof. Dr. Matthias Becher and edited by Dr. Katharina Gahbler. For the project, around 3,000 chronicles, annals and historical works from the early Middle Ages were listed in order to record sources that describe the interaction of the Christian-Latin West with Muslims in the centuries that followed the Islamic expansion. Contemporary historians often referred to them as “Saracens”. The result is an extensive collection of data comprising 622 text passages from over 70 works, which were recorded in full text and, where available, with a translation and annotated with categories and keywords for further analysis. In a further step, the data was enriched by tagging people and places and linking them together.
In the online platform that has now been published, the data prepared in this way is made available to the scientific community and interested members of the public. Specifically, the platform is a Semantic MediaWiki. The software supports the management, presentation and retrieval of semantically linked and annotated data and offers an interface that is familiar to many users from Wikipedia and is therefore intuitive to use. The subsequent use of established and widely used software for data presentation is also associated with the expectation that the availability of the presentation can be guaranteed for as long as possible.
A suitable data model was developed at the CCeH in collaboration with Bonn-based employees for the data originally recorded in traditional word processing formats and the information was converted into a documented XML format accordingly. On the basis of this initial format, new consistency checks, curation steps and markup levels as well as the enrichment through the integration of standardized data on persons and places were implemented in several cycles. A special feature of the project is that the enriched source data is transformed into a wiki-specific exchange format using an XSLT pipeline and then imported into the Semantic MediaWiki. Further focal points of the Digital Humanities in the project were the adequate mapping of the recorded information in the data model of the Semantic MediaWiki and the implementation of data visualizations and overviews in the wiki.
From a Digital Humanities perspective, the “Saracen Wiki” is a test and demonstration case. The aim here was to show ways in which existing, “typical” data from the historical/humanities sciences can be transferred into more general data models with limited resources and presented in an established and maintainable working and publication environment.
Special thanks are due first of all to the students who participated with great commitment in an advanced seminar by Prof. Dr. Øyvind Eide and Dr. Katharina Gahbler on data processing in the project in the winter semester 2016/17. Then, in particular, the student and research assistants (Benjamin Bigalke, Dana Persch and Adalbert Wrona), who implemented most of the data processing and programming. The creation of the Repertorium Saracenorum was conceived and coordinated by Dr. Katharina Gahbler and Lukas Müller on the Bonn side and by Prof. Dr. Patrick Sahle (until 2019) and Jonathan Blumtritt on the Cologne side.
To the website:
https://saraceni.uni-koeln.de/
Press release of the University of Bonn:
https://www.uni-bonn.de/de/neues/312-2021
Picture credits
Julia Sorouri, based on illustrations from the Madrid illuminated manuscript by Johannes Skylitz