Cluster meeting of the CC Authority Files and Community-driven Vocabularies

Invitation to the meeting on 11 November 2025: Historical geodata in the letters to Goethe

As part of the cluster meeting of the CC ‘Authority Files and Community-driven Vocabularies’ on 11 November 2025, 1:00 pm, Marthe Küster will present the results of her master’s thesis on “The World in Letters: Challenges in the indexing of historical geodata in digital editions”.

In the context of NFDI4Objects, historical geodata plays an important role in object indexing, as editions and archive materials represent potential sources with object information. In her master’s thesis, Marthe Küster focussed on the letters to Goethe; the data will be successively published on the research platform ‘PROPYLÄEN - Goethes Biographica’ until 2039. The data was provided by the Goethe and Schiller Archive of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar as a TEI-XML dataset with around 15,000 letters.

The project analysed the current status of the indexing of geographic information in the letter metadata as well as the potential challenges that arose when recording the letter metadata and enriching it with identifiers. These range from missing and vague location information to changing place names. The aim of the work was to show which challenges occur how frequently when capturing geodata in historical letters. Around 15,000 letter metadata were analysed using Jupyter notebooks (Python) and a sample of 300 letter texts were coded using MAXQDA.

Zoom-Link: https://dainst-org.zoom.us/j/97453999628?pwd=vx6Fwm55iMWdWkqwKlWS5cXbFOdvbq.1

Meeting-ID: 974 5399 9628

Kenncode: 129006

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How to join: https://dainst-org.zoom.us/meetings/97453999628/invitations?signature=OK40QNACBbWt5Ffjif4spjw9EyCLO1L4QdrnbiLBhY4

Registration is not necessary, we look forward to your participation and an exchange.