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The
The project “travel!digital. Exploring
Baedeker Corpus, a digital collection of early German travel guides that is currently being developed in the
travel!digital project
People and
Monuments in Baedeker Guidebooks (1875–1914)” is funded by the platform
Digital Humanities Austria.
The
Palestine and Syria (1875), Lower (1877) and Upper Egypt (1891), North America and Mexico (1893), Asia Minor (1905), the Mediterranean Coastline of Africa (1909), India and Ceylon (1914). Baedeker Corpus comprises
all first editions of German travel guides on non-European countries which were brought out by the Baedeker publishing house before World War I. It contains more than 1.5 million running words and covers various regions, offering a balanced picture of different cultural areas.
Linked Open Data resources will assist in exploring cultural narratives from the turn of the 19th century.
Focusing on
people and
monuments, two essential components of the guidebook genre and of cultural discourse itself, the extensive lexical inventory is represented by means of the
Simple Knowledge Organization System SKOS. Besides personal names, people are addressed in a variety of different forms in the guidebooks. References to classes are frequently used in making generalizations about groups and individuals as well (cf. Schmidt-Brücken, 2015). Each of these generic expressions is represented by a
bdk:Descriptor, which is defined as a subclass of
skos:Concept. Individual terms are encoded as
skosxl:prefLabel(s) and
skosxl:altLabel(s). Variants and translations are designated on term-level by the properties
hasVariant/isVariantOf and
hasTranslation/isTranslationOf. Modelled in this way, the vocabulary identified in the guidebooks forms the basis of the concept scheme. Seven categories indicated by
skos:topConceptOf improve structuring of the
bdk:ConceptSchemeGroups:
1. Collective terms:
population, tribes, natives;
2. ethnic/national communities:
Englishmen, Wedda;
3. geographical concepts:
Europeans, Orientals;
4. names of languages and scripts, language affiliation:
Arabic, Cyrillic;
5. professions, including political, religious, economic roles, and styles of living:
merchants, government officials, priests, peasants, nomads;
6. religious communities:
brotherhood, pilgrims; Buddhists, Sikhs; and
7. social classes:
castes, workers. Concepts and labels include both nouns and adjectives, indicating associations among them by means of the property
skos:related. Figure 1 lists definitions of
skos:topConcept(s) and shows selected examples of concepts and labels.
The picture is similarly varied for monuments and notable sights. Since assessments and classifications of cultural heritage objects are integral parts of cultural representation, they are included in a separate concept scheme. The
bdk:ConceptSchemeMonuments is organized by
skos:topConcept(s) which indicate topical spheres the objects belong to, ranging from architecture and artworks, to accommodations, landscapes, and breath-taking views.
By the end of the project, a web application based on the
Cf.
https://clarin.oeaw.ac.at/corpus_shell [accessed 2015-12-22].
Cf.
https://www.clarin.eu/content/federated-content-search-clarin-fcs [accessed 2015-12-22].
LOD datasets: VIAF Virtual International Authority File, GESIS Thesaurus for the Social Sciences, AAT Art & Architecture Thesaurus, UNESCO Thesaurus, DBpedia.corpus_shell framework
people/s and
monuments in the texts into links to the LOD cloud
Baedeker Corpus to other online resources, providing enhanced access to the corpus and additional information via the guidebooks’ main actors. The presented data model aims at supporting fine-grained examinations of semantic components that have a lasting influence on cultural perceptions of “Other” and “Self”. It is expected that semantic technologies do have the potential to reveal much about a discourse that goes far beyond travel literature.