The online platform Bourckhardtsource (burckhardtsource.org) was created in order to make the correspondence of the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt available to a wider audience.
The platform not only makes available the letters that Burckhardt has exchanged with the most remarkable people of the European culture of his time both as images of the original manuscripts and philological transcriptions, but also improves them with the use of semantic annotations and information from the Linked Data.
Thanks to this linked content, users can easily check the most relevant entities mentioned by the authors as they correspond to each other. But semantic annotations are much more than just linked references: the contents of the letters can be used to connect people, works of art, places or bibliographic objects such as books and articles and create a new way of combining content and visualizing relationships both among the letters themselves and among the correspondents of Jacob Burckhardt. Moreover, with advanced semantic navigation, the user can filter the missives that have references to a specific place, or a particular painting, or select all the letters in which a particular book is cited or a person is mentioned, and thus create a map of the connections that could shed new light on the content itself. The platform presents some of these possible paths as guided readings that the project's scholars have identified.
The formula of a platform in which historical content is present as digitized images, philological transcriptions and annotated editions that coexist in a combined form proves to be absolutely winning and rich in perspectives. From a more general point of view, the platform shows the advantages that this model can give to a variety of different sources and opens the way to a new generation of digital editions that are at the same time accessible to the curious who want to learn more about a topic and to scholars who need a new tool for more in-depth research.
In order to provide a comprehensive account for each of these exchanges, the project has leveraged digital technologies.
The collection and recording of the corpus have been particularly challenging in respect to (i) the annotation of the textual elements within the critical edition, (ii) the integration of object, process and digital information about the edition and the (iii) recording of experts’ opinions throughout an extra annotative layer over the text. In order to overcome these initial challenges, the project has defined a semantic framework of operation that tied together each of the content-based or context-based elements, creating a reusable set of data that can be additionally analysed revealing further artistic, sociological and historical information.
The initial critical edition has been digitally constructed using TEI/XML as the format of choice for encoding textual variances. TEI was chosen because it was the de facto standard exchange format used for digital editions. The information about the person, places, books and artworks cited in the letter were further encoded using a novel annotation system and link together using Semantic Web technologies and linked data. The content of the letter was contextualised using a series of attributes (e.g. metadata) to be able to describe the physical, digital and processual dimensions of each letter. Each of these attributes was used to link a textual resource within a graph of meanings that helped to frame the content of the letter in their historical period. The result, gathered together in a digital library/website freely accessible by the users, is not a simple semantic network of letters, but a historical account of the conversation of the time, a window in history that can be browsed using a single access point.
