Bernhard Koller (Linguistics, University of Vienna)

Lecture Series: Introduction to Digital Humanities

The lecture will discuss an ongoing project to edit the written correspondence between Emil Sieg and Wilhelm Siegling, the founders of the field of Tocharian studies, spanning the years between 1908 and 1946. In addition to the general historical interest of this material, the correspondence contains detailed discussions of their collaborative research on the Tocharian languages, which is why the data is being embedded under the CEToM project, a database of Tocharian text editions. In the lecture I will provide a short overview of the material and its significance and then use the project to exemplify a number of basic workflow steps in the digital edition process. These include transcribing handwritten documents using Transkribus, converting the digitized data to TEI using XSLT, and preparing the TEI data for presentation on a website. The lecture will further provide a brief overview of how Tocharian text editions are encoded within the CEToM project, and how the information contained within Sieg and Siegling's correspondence is integrated within this system.