We invite BærUt! network members and those curious about whether the BærUt! community is for them to join us for a 90-minute open session.
This month we are lucky to have Associate Professor Christian-Emil Smith Ore with us, who will give a presentation titled: Diplomatarium Norvegicum, Regesta Norvegica and Oluf Rygh’s Norske Gaardnavne (Norwegian Farmnames) – how to create digital editions prepared for linked data – a lunch snack about the process, design philosophy and method
About the project
Diplomatarium Norvegicum, Regesta Norvegica and Oluf Rygh’s Norske Gaardnavne (Norwegian Farmnames)
The topic is large, and the presentation will be short. A more detailed presentation can be given at a later point in time if there is interest.
The material
Diplomatarium Norvegicum (DN) is a series of 23 volumes comprising text editions of documents pertaining Norway in the period 1000 to 1537 (Lutheran Reformation). The first volume was published in 1846 and most recent in 2011. The original documents are written in Latin, Old Norse, Medieval English, Low German, Middle Norwegian, Danish and other languages. Each entry in DN comprises date, place, summary, information about the original and a transcription of the original document. The provenance of the texts is given as detailed as possible. The documents are letters, contracts, wills, rolls, confirmations. A substantial part are transcribed from books of copies of outgoing correspondence, for example from the Vatican, cf. the news about an agreement between the Norwegian National Library and the Vatican archive (https://www.nb.no/pressemeldinger/nasjonalbiblioteket-inngar-unik-intensjonsavtale-med-vatikanet/ December 2024).
Scientific methods, views on the past and the focus of historians have changed a lot since 1846. In the mid-1970s the Norwegian National Archives started a new series, called Regesta Novegica (RN), with updated information about the Medieval documents. The entries in the RN contain the same information categories as in DN, but the information is checked and updated, and the summaries are new and written in modern Norwegian. RN contains entries about documents not described in DN. RN is currently published in 10 volumes (1978–2015) and covers the period 822–1430.
Oluf Rygh’s Norwegian Farm names (GN) is, as the title suggests, about farm names in Norway. It is based on the background material used in the compilation of the 1886 cadastre. Each entry contains cadastral identifier, official spelling, pronunciation, etymology/historical forms written sources where the name occurs or is described, for example in entries in DN. The series comprises 17 volumes and was published from 1897 to 1924. Both DN and GN represent the nation building process in the 19th century and were compiled by historians and philologists from the same small academic environment in Norway at the time.
The work
Both DN and RN were digitized in the Documentation Project (Dokumentasjonsprosjektet https://www.dokpro.uio.no) and were published on the web in 1997. In the mid-1990s facsimiles were expensive and difficult to handle – fortunately –, and the texts had to be keyed manually and were given a simple markup that made them easy to proofread and made it possible to transform them into TEI P5 15 years later.
RN was digitized and published on the web as a collaboration between the National Archive and Unit for Digital Documentation (EDD) at the University of Oslo (2002–). The volumes 1–6 were stored at magnetic tapes, some of which were unfortunately reused for other purposes, and the printed volumes had to be OCR-ed and proofread. The newer volumes existed as quarkxpress files and the version before the final proofs, and the last volume was a latex file. Even though RN is a relatively new scholarly edition (1978–2015), the somewhat clumsy preservation of the electronic files is not untypical and illustrates indeed what we should address in the BÆRUT-report.
Topics of the presentation
How we performed the information analysis, planned the work, how it was done in practise, further use (linked data detailed analysis), the ravages of time and lessons learned.
Bring your own lunch, we will serve coffee/tea, something sweet and fruity.