Digitalized Historical Sources: New Accesses to Ancient Knowledge
How is our view of historical sources changing as a result of the digital transformation? You will gain insight into the current research project ORD Xplore, research on digital editions, and the role of libraries in processes of digitization.
Historical text and image sources are an important basis for research in the humanities. The digital transformation is currently creating very promising opportunities to explore old sources in a new way. One example of this is digital editions, which are often created in cooperation between researchers and libraries. Digital editions make historical documents available to researchers as digitized copies and offer transcriptions and sophisticated search options. Examples for the new possibilities of digital editions at the UZH are the projects “Bullinger Digital” and “Johann Caspar Lavater: Historisch-kritische Edition ausgewählter Briefwechsel (JCLB)”, which you can get to know at our booth.
A particularly great potential lies in the creation of connections between different digital editions. The ORD-Xplore project uses modern digital techniques to identify and link temporal or geographical information in the editions. This allows researchers and interested laypeople to make new references in historical data and connect sources more easily. At our booth, they learn in a playful way and using the example of culturally and historically significant Zurich source collections, how they can use ORD-Xplore to discover exciting information from digital editions.
