Network analyses of foreign travellers through Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania between 1831-1840

"Foreign travelers backgrounds alongside journey routes followed into Romanian Lands between 1831-1840 were placed into a database and mapped into different geographical, social or chronological visualizations in a unique approach for Romanian historiography. Making use of Nodegoat, a platform that allows researchers to compile large databases and to analyze these data, relying on network-type connections, I created various easy-readable and modellable graphs which shows differences and similarities between travelers. Less effort is now needed for complex analysis which could have taken weeks or months back then, because all of these were made by the platform within few clicks with the help of various filters. Building profiles and comparing them, analyses traveler’s studies according to professions and seeking for their motivation behind journey and travel path followed are just some of the analyses made by this project. Even though it comprehend only 46 travelers from a decade this project have a great potential in near future by integrating all of the volumes coordinated by Paul Cernovodeanu into a single database. Keywords: foreign travelers, network analyses, geographical visualizations, social visualisations, Nodegoat "

The Construction of a Database with the Pupils of the Greek Catholic High School in Beiuș and the Geographic Visualization of their Birthplace (1876/1877 School Year)

The article discusses the implementation of a database presenting the pupils that studied at the Greek Catholic High School in Beiuș in the 1876/1877 school year and presents a series of geographic annotations made on a map of the Habsburg Empire, opened in QGIS, consisting in the birthplaces of the aforementioned pupils. The database and the geographic annotations presented here are already being developed to include further pupils that studied at the Greek Catholic High School in Beiuș subsequent to the 1876/1877 school year. Therefore, the database and the geographic annotations are a pilot version of a broader project meant to conclude into a monograph regarding the Greek Catholic High School in Beiuș in the 19th century and first quarter of the 20th century. Keywords: database, Airtable, QGIS, Beiuș, high school, 1876/1877 school year

Encoding youthful perspectives of the Anti-Communist Revolution

"Encoding youthful perspectives of the Anti-Communist Revolution” presents in a captivating manner two interviews dating back to the time in the history of Romania when the country was struggling with the Communist revolution which started in Timisoara. The perspective in which this information is described is the XML language. In order to simplify the data and to make it more accesible, there were used tags in a scheme. By using this method, the readers can have a better understanding of the text while having an over-all look upon the discussed historical issue. Keywords: XML, Text encoding, Anti-Communist Revolution, Testimonies, Oxygen XML Editor "

The enlightened minds of the pastoral land of Mărginimea Sibiului

This project aims to configure a map of the most important personalities in the Mărginimea Sibiului. The present research presents practically the methodology of all the stages completed. Starting with the selection of information, its organization in tables and up to the geographical representation of the information gathered about intellectuals. The career path of each one is not a complex one, but the idea started from the fact that we wanted to demonstrate how a rural, agrarian area, restricted from a geographical point of view, offered to the national culture several paramount intellectuals such as Ioan Lupaș, Octavian Goga, Emil Cioran, Samuel Micu. Keywords: digital humanities, Airtable, Qgis, database, maps, Google Maps, Transylvania

DaT18 Database: A Prosopographical Approach to the Study of the Social Structures of Religious Dissent in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Transylvania

"Drawing on the many records created by the Habsburg state during the confessional troubles in Transylvania from the 1740s to the 1760s, the DaT18 project merges digital instruments and prosopography to arrive at sketching the social pattern of the Orthodox leadership. This article briefly discusses the technical choices involved in building the relational database that my approach centres on, before talking in more detail about the challenges faced when transposing the information in the primary sources into digital format. First, the question of making use of structured vs. unstructured data, as most of the documents I work with already present some form of tabular layout, while the more narrative ones require different strategies to mitigate losses when converting them. Secondly, the difficult process of record linkage, with many of the persons only mentioned by their first name and no surname to help label each individual entered in more than one source. Lastly, the daunting task of estimating economic resources, since there was no reliable standard in an age that saw four different fiscal systems in use and many regional flavours within the same scheme. Keywords: prosopography, relational database, clerical careers, data structuring, Greek Orthodox Church."

Epigraphic Squeezes: Digitisation, Publication, and Enhancement

"Epigraphic squeezes are a key tool for research and teaching. They also have historical and documentary value. They are reliable copies of inscribed text and become the only evidence that remains if inscriptions are lost or destroyed. This paper describes the Venice Squeeze Project for the preservation and enhancement of epigraphic squeezes in the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. For the initial phase of the project, the Ca’ Foscari University collection of epigraphic squeezes was published in the digital ektypotheke E-stampages. The current phase involves developing a web application to digitise epigraphic squeezes according to the metadata architecture of E-stampages. The first part of this paper describes the background of the Venice Squeeze Project and methodological issues, which fostered the partnership with E-stampages. The second part describes the relational database that was set up to digitise the Ca’ Foscari collection. The third part introduces the project initiatives to promote a network of Italian institutions interested in digitizing their collections of epigraphic squeezes. Keywords: Greek epigraphy, squeezes, database architecture"

Preliminary Research on Computer-Assisted Transcription of Medieval Scripts in the Latin Alphabet using AI Computer Vision techniques and Machine Learning. A Romanian Exploratory Initiative

"The objective of the present paper is to introduce to a wider audience, at a very early stage of development, the initial results of a Romanian joint initiative of AI software engineers and palaeographers in an experimental project aiming to assist and improve the transcription effort of medieval texts with AI software solutions, uniquely designed and trained for the task. Our description will start by summarizing the previous attempts and the mixed-results achieved in e-palaeography so far, a continuously growing field of combined scholarship at an international level. The second part of the study describes the specific project, developed by Zetta Cloud, with the aim of demonstrating that, by applying state of the art AI Computer Vision algorithms, it is possible to automatically binarize and segment text images with the final scope of intelligently extracting the content from a sample set of medieval handwritten text pages. Keywords: Middle Ages, Latin writing, palaeography, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, automatic transcription."

Publication, Testing and Visualization with EFES: A tool for all stages of the EpiDoc XML editing process

"EpiDoc is a set of recommendations, schema and other tools for the encoding of ancient texts, especially inscriptions and papyri, in TEI XML, that is now used by upwards of a hundred projects around the world, and large numbers of scholars seek training in EpiDoc encoding every year. The EpiDoc Front-End Services tool (EFES) was designed to fill the important need for a publication solution for researchers and editors who have produced EpiDoc encoded texts but do not have access to digital humanities support or a well-funded IT service to produce a publication for them. This paper will discuss the use of EFES not only for final publication, but as a tool in the editing and publication workflow, by editors of inscriptions, papyri and similar texts including those on coins and seals. The edition visualisations, indexes and search interface produced by EFES are able to serve as part of the validation, correction and research apparatus for the author of an epigraphic corpus, iteratively improving the editions long before final publication. As we will argue, this research process is a key component of epigraphic and papyrological editing practice, and studying these needs will help us to further enhance the effectiveness of EFES as a tool. To this end we also plan to add three major functionalities to the EFES toolbox: (1) date visualisation and filter—building on the existing “date slider,” and inspired by partner projects such as Pelagios and Godot; (2) geographic visualization features, again building on Pelagios code, allowing the display of locations within a corpus or from a specific set of search results in a map; (3) export of information and metadata from the corpus as Linked Open Data, following the recommendations of projects such as the Linked Places format, SNAP, Chronontology and Epigraphy.info, to enable the semantic sharing of data within and beyond the field of classical and historical editions. Finally, we will discuss the kinds of collaboration that will be required to bring about desired enhancements to the EFES toolset, especially in this age of research-focussed, short-term funding. Embedding essential infrastructure work of this kind in research applications for specific research and publication projects will almost certainly need to be part of the solution. Keywords: Text Encoding, Ancient Texts, Epigraphy, Papyrology, Digital Publication, Linked Open Data, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations"

Digital Framework for the History of the Austrian Military Border in Transylvania

"The study provides the documentation for the first public version of the database Digital Framework for the History of the Austrian Military Border in Transylvania by means of a detailed description and user manual. It includes: a short overview of the historical context of the establishment of the Austrian military border in this province, references to the international and Romanian state of the art, the detailing of primary sources issued by the military environment and starting from which the database was built and the main principles of construction and operation of the latter. The information in the database is extracted from the records of the military and administrative personnel of the Transylvanian border regiments between 1763 and 1850, including monthly staff records, information on salaries, enrollments, transfers, desertions, medical certificates, etc. The lists of conduct of the officers should also be mentioned, each of them including a detailed physical and psychological description of the respective person. The database serves two aims. On the one hand, to boost the use of and access to documents generated by the Austrian military and with this to bring the Romanian historical writing on the military border in Transylvania closer to the primary sources. On the other hand, to complement, for the territory of the former military border, the vital registration data provided by parish registers with social history data that can improve life course reconstruction and analysis. Keywords: Historical databases, Austrian Military Border, Transylvania, Habsburg Monarchy, Military history "