Call for collaborationThe Joint Creation of a Text Series Typology

4 July 2023

Photo: British Library

London, British Library, Royal MS 6 E VI/2, fol. 329r - Miniature for the entry 'Color' in James le Palmer: Omne Bonum

A recently launched project by Marco Heiles and Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer takes advantage of the benefits of open, digital publishing: their text series typology creates a controlled vocabulary for designating text series in Middle High German and Early High German literature up to around 1520.

Controlled vocabularies provide lists of terms on whose use in the scholarly community is uncontroversial. Once certain hierarchies are established within these vocabularies, they form a taxonomy. If additional information is provided on the concepts of a taxonomy, it is called a thesaurus. Controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and thesauri are thus systems of knowledge organisation that create conceptual clarity. This is of vital importance in the context of research on complex phenomena, especially in digital projects. In particular, conceptual clarity in digital data enables stable references and ensures digital sustainability in the sense of the FAIR principles.

Inspired by their own research and based on their engagement with the scholarly community in their fields, Marco Heiles and Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer have recently started a project to build a freely accessible, controlled vocabulary for the text series of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. The aim of the project is to create an application-oriented thesaurus that can be used to classify and annotate resources.

The text series typology attempts to capture the terms used in German literature studies and linguistics to classify texts into genres and text types. This attempt is based on the idea that texts are never created completely independently of each other, but always refer to each other, and that their producers consciously and unconsciously observe conventional patterns that control and enable the reception of the texts – even in a time when there was no fixed terminology to describe texts.

Designed as a Linked Open Data resource (LOD), the text series typology is intended to be used and developed collaboratively by the scientific community. A beta version has recently been published online, and the two founders describe the background, goals and methodology of their approach in a freely accessible essay in which they solicit input from the community to improve the beta version of the model collectively. They make the SKOS vocabulary available on GitHub and in the research data repository of Universität Hamburg.

Experts in the respective fields may contribute their knowledge to make the typology better for everyone.