Projekt

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Dimitrie Cantemir was one of the most prominent figures at the end of XVIIth and beginning of the XVIIIth century in the cultural space of Central Eastern Europe. His works about the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Description of Moldavia were translated in English, German and French and remained capital works until the end of XIXth century. Cantemir's books are partially testimonies of things, events and places he experienced himself. This brings a plus of subjectivism in his writings which results in a scientific discussion about the validity of his historical style. Digital Humanities nowadays tend to use huge corpora ("big data") to achieve reliable results with computer-based technologies. However, behind all interpretations, such as reliability discussions, stands a hermeneutic approach, which is always qualitative in nature. Such research can be backed up by quantitative descriptions of the material. The scientific use of annotations is usually a positive ascription of features, such as "is reliable" or "is not reliable" and a statistics of the corresponding feature. This kind of approach ignores a fundamental aspect of the data, the vagueness of many assertions and thus the drawbacks of such crisp choice "is/is not". The project aims at investigating to which extent assertions found in Cantemir's original texts (in Latin) or in the translations in German and Romanian are: (a) consistent within the same text and across the originals, (b) reliable with respect to author's annotations or the annotations of further translators; (c) consistent and reliable across different language versions. The result of the project will be on the computer science side a prototype tool for computer-based hermeneutic reliability research in historical texts. On the humanistic side the project will deliver a reinterpretation of the hermeneutic cycle given external knowledge, the qualitative analysis performed by historians with the help of the computer based approach, and a comparative report.

• Prof. Dr. Thomas Eich

  Universität Hamburg
  Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften
  Asien-Afrika-Institut
  Hamburg
  

• Dr. Anca Dinu, Ph.D.

  University of Bucharest
  Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures
  Modern Languages Department
  Bucharest
  Rumänien
  

• Dr. Cristina Vertan

  Universität Hamburg
  Informatik
  Hamburger Informatik Technologie-Center e.V
  Hamburg
  

• First Workshop on Language technology for Digital Humanities in Central and (South-)Eastern Europe

• On the annotation of vague expressions: a case study on Romanian historical texts

• Eine Fallstudie zur Annotation von Vagheit in Werken Dimitrie Cantemirs