Scholars, excavators and art dealers: The correspondence of the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica as a source of knowledge and network indicator

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Ortwin Dally; Professor Dr. Reinhard Förtsch
• Subject Area: Classical, Roman, Christian and Islamic Archaeology ; Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 318512975

The Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, Institute of Archaeological Correspondence, the predecessor institution of the now globally active German Archaeological Institute (DAI) was formally founded on the 21st of April 1829 in Rome. The aim of the explicit international initiative was, and is still today, to explore archaeological discoveries in the Mediterranean and beyond, to explore and to publish the cultural heritage. A Europe-ranging network of members and correspondents, among whom scholars of the classical antiquity, artists and architects, collectors and excavators together with amateurs interested in archaeology, reported in letters on archaeological news and artifacts from their respective territories and collections. These singular collections of letters are in the Rome department and the headquarter of the DAI in Berlin. The correspondences are on one hand all-important sources of knowledge on archaeology of the 19th to 20th century, on the other hand, they are witnesses of the dense network formed around the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica. To improve essentially the availability and the indexing of the scholarly letters is the main aim of the project. The autographs are to be adequately indexed, appropriately filed, digitized, analysed and made available online in open access for the research community. The digital data will be elaborated using network and text-based analyses in order to visualize the network-relationship between the correspondents. Specific working areas evaluate the metadata of the letters, including personal names (sender/recipient), the geographical and chronological data and the respective amount of letters/records. In another field OCR-able typewritten transcriptions of the letters are to be analyzed (semi-)automatically in terms of mentioned names and places and their co-occurrence in a chronologically quantified framework. The content of a selected part of the correspondence, namely the letters to and from Eduard Gerhard, will be completely scientifically studied. The visualized data will be searchable in iDAI.Objects/Arachne, showing the correspondence networks of the Institute in the 19th century with its protagonists and actual places in relation to time as well as topics, people, and sites addressed in the correspondence. In this way, at least a part of the inquiries regarding the archive sent to the DAI by the scientific community can be duly answered. By digitizing the letters a long-term preservation of the unique documents as well as a contribution to the protection of the fragile originals will be achieved. The letter collections will be scheduled and visualized both in the DAI systems as well as in national and international portals and databases. The possibilities of information technology open new ways to deal with the material, and might entail new research issues.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)