A transcription of a criminal case from the 1770s I created formed the base for research on three episodes (plus a bonus episode) 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 was researching the case of Eva Faschauner, because I was reworking the Wikipedia article about the case. The court case took place in the region I grew up in and 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 – which are the court protocols. They are kept at the Carinthian State Archive. Since there were a lot of rumors going on and the discussion if Eva Faschauner was offender or victim was still present almost 250 years later I was curious on the content of the protocols. So far several people seemed to have read them and provided written summaries but the original text was not available. I then reached out to the Carinthian State Archive and asked for a digital reproduction because it was not possible for me to 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, which was graciously covered by the City Archive of Gmünd.
The protocols are written in German cursive (kurrent), which not many people are able to read nowadays and which I trained myself to read. To avoid having to decipher the handwriting again and again when revisiting the protocols 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. Contrary to the “Open” in this website’s topic it was not published under a open license but with “all rights reserved”. Nevertheless, it is openly available under the limits of the copyright law and thus you can call it “open access” because you do not have to pay to read it or obtain a digital copy.
So 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 and 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 and visited Gmünd and places connected to the case . An interview with myself was scheduled, but I was ill at the time. After that they produced the above mentioned three episodes (plus a bonus Q&A episode) that were well researched, kept close to the facts while also exploring different views and in the end drew 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 have asked her what led them to the decision to pick the case of Eva Faschauner for their first historic case and she replied that on one hand the case has different perspectives and is still talked about 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 in that e.g. 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 because I created it 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. But the beauty in open access lies in the fact that everybody can inspect the document themselves if they are interested and review what was said. This possibility was also mentioned in the podcast.