M. Perstling
A large amount of interesting historical sources have never been critically edited due to the complexity of their internal structure and the difficulty to represent and to process them. Furthermore, an edition of a multi-layered and multidimensional source in a traditional printed form – in most of all cases – cannot satisfy the historian’s expectations. As an alternative we propose an elaborated method of digitally editing, especially designed for the processing and disseminating of complex and not linear sources: it offers a large gain of information compared to a classical, typographically oriented edition. The added value can be found in coming over the linearity of a printed edition: hyper media in its genuine sense as well as advanced database techniques are needed to handle the different layers of the source. In this way content and form of the source can be strictly separated and the potential user should be able to distinguish between the source itself and the editor’s knowledge about it.
The example of the “Steirisch-landesfürstliche Marchfutterurbar” of 1414/1426, a tax book of the Late Middle Ages, will demonstrate how a digital edition of a complex and multi-layered source could look like. The whole edition is based on a method called “integrated computer-assisted editing”, by applying international standards like XML-based models and data. The goal of editing sources like these is mainly retrieving particular information and not simply (linearly) reading. This process must be facilitated for the user by offering different ways to access the source at a multidimensional level.
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