Event-based modelling of a major historical government source: Ministerratsprotokolle 1848–1918

Abstract

Our paper showcases a critical-historical document edition with a long tradition and of considerable size, the “Ministerratsprotokolle” (MRP). We are currently transferring the MRP to a digital-edition paradigm, based on the XML markup scheme proposed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Our paper starts out by presenting the corpus and discussing the workflows that lead to the present state of the MRP data. Our main task is to edit, but also to disseminate this important digital Cultural Heritage resource. In order to open access to a broader public quickly, our choice fell on the easiest to process and most general category in our code: events. Events in our case include first of all the dates of ministerial council sessions and the agenda items discussed during these sessions. For these two kinds of events, we propose a markup strategy that is compatible to RDF statements, linking documented text and facts which the text is referring to. To insure reusability from across all disciplines, we are using a prototype eXist-db application that serves the data both as TEI XML and via API. The aim of our paper is twofold: To theoretically discuss event-based modelling of textual resources, and to describe the corpus unlocked by this type of modelling.