General Archive - Open/S/D/K

Carinthia Nature Tech: a new Journal

The National Science Association for Carinthia created a new journal in cooperation with the Carinthia University of Applied Science: Carinthia Nature Tech. It serves as Part 3 of the Carinthia II publication – a series existing since 1811 (until 1891 together with the Historical Society for Carinthia).

Book Digitization on Demand

In the post about Digitizing old books to make them accessible again I mentioned the service eod books. I now tried it out and wanted to report how it went. In summary it was a smooth experience but the details depend on the library you order from, especially in terms of how much money you need to invest and which rights are granted to you.

Large Language Models and Medieval Charters

Recently Large Language Models have gotten a lot of attention. Some results are quite impressive but I find the hype around it quite unjustified. Probably a large portion comes from companies trying to secure funding for the quite money-intense R&D, training and running of those models or from freeloaders. But since they are available let’s try how they perform with medieval texts, handwriting and Latin.

What persistent content identifiers are and why they are used

How do you access content on the internet? You probably use search engines and/or follow links. By now most are used to the somewhat cryptic format of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). But how often have you followed a link and were greeted with a more or less cryptic page saying the page was not found (and also maybe mentioning the number 404)?

Digitizing old books to make them accessible again

I digitized a few books for the Municipal Archive of Gmünd (Stadtarchiv Gmünd in Kärnten) which are of local interest but were out of print with few copies in libraries or privately owned. Here I describe the process of how I did that.

Accurately representing medieval texts with digital fonts

When working with medieval texts (e.g. from the 14^th century) written in e.g. German there are certain characters or ligatures that cannot be represented with most digital fonts. One of the simpler examples of those characters are predecessors of today’s German umlauts like „ü“. In 14^th century texts you find those written as „uͤ“. During transcription you could simply represent them with „ue“ or „u^e“. While this works some of the characteristics of the original are altered or lost.