A transcription of a criminal case from the 1770s I created formed the base for research on three episodes of a true crime podcast of Austrian newspaper Kurier. Without this digitally available open access document creating those episodes would not have been possible the journalist told me.
Let’s start a few years ago. I researched the case of Eva Faschauner, because I reworked the Wikipedia article about the case. The court case took place in the region I grew up in. It happened at the end of the 18th century. Eva Faschauner was accused of murdering her husband with poison, was sentenced to death, and was then beheaded in 1773. The case is still present in regional folklore. For a summary (in German) please see the mentioned Wikipedia article.
Literature on the case as well as a novel all referred to the only written account we have today. The court protocols, which the Carinthian State Archive keeps nowadays. There were a lot of rumors going on about the case. Also, the discussion if Eva Faschauner was offender or victim was still present almost 250 years later. So I was curious about the content of the protocols.
So far several people seemingly did read them and did provide written summaries but the original text was not available. I then reached out to the Carinthian State Archive and asked for a digital reproduction. I did that, because I couldn’t visit the archive multiple times for working on the originals. At first they were hesitant about it but then agreed to provide a digital reproduction of the 210 folios. They charged less then what was in their price list but it still amounted to several hundred Euro. The City Archive of Gmünd graciously covered the bill.
The protocols are written in German cursive (kurrent), which not many people can read nowadays. I trained myself to read this script and wanted to avoid having to decipher the handwriting again and again when revisiting the protocols. So I decided to create a digital transcription of the protocols. In addition this would enable full-text search on the text. This endeavor took several weeks and was a winter’s project in 2021/2022. I then published the document on the website for the digital archives of the City Archive of Gmünd. Often I choose open licenses, but here I published the document with “all rights reserved”. Nevertheless, it is openly available under the limits of the copyright law. So you can call it “open access” because it is not paywalled.
With that everybody can inspect and use it. In fall of 2024 a journalist from Kurier’s true crime podcast “Dunkle Spuren” (dark traces) approached the City Archive of Gmünd. She told them that they wanted to produce some episodes about the case and requested some background information. They talked to several experts (e.g. a historian, an expert on history of law, a pathologist) and other people. They also visited Gmünd and places connected to the case . We scheduled an interview with myself, but I was ill at the time. After that they produced the above mentioned three episodes (plus a bonus Q&A episode). They researched them well, kept close to the facts while also exploring different views. In the end they painted a quite complete picture of the whole court case. You can listen to the podcast (in German) on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
The journalist mentioned in the bonus episode that researching the case would not have been possible without the transcription of the protocols. I asked her what led them to the decision to pick the case of Eva Faschauner for their first historic case. She replied that on one hand the case shows different perspectives and is still present today but on the other hand has sources readily available (e.g. the Wikipedia article and the transcription of the protocols).
The existence of an open access document made it possible to produce a thorough review of a court case. Journalists from an Austrian newspaper have far more possibilities for research than myself. For example, experts are more likely to talk to them than to some random person. That a document I invested quite some time into helped them is great for me. I created the document for my own benefit but also for the benefit of others. To be fair, if the document would not have been openly accessible the journalists would also have been able to work with it. Still, the beauty of open access is that everybody can inspect the document themselves. They also mentioned this possibility in the podcast.