The Court Records of Wschowa (1495–1526). Digital Edition

Abstract

The article proposes a new method of source edition presented on the example of the first Wschowa court book. The book comprises the entries from the end of the 15th and the beginnings of the 16th century and amounts to nearly 200 sheets of the manuscript. The essence of the method is presentation of the source itself and the effects of work of the authors on the three interconnected layers: scan of the book, two attribute tables, and GIS map. The edition was elaborated with use of the INDXr application. The process of elaboration involved adding two layers to the digitised facsimile of the manuscript. The layers correspond to the two aforementioned tables in the database, which are the key part of the edition. The table of entries contains their list along some basic information on each of them (unique ID, the page scope, heading, date, comments) and a full reading of chosen entries. The second one – index table – contains the personal and geographical names as well as key terms indexes. The key terms are given in their source form, the names were normalised and geographical places were matched with ID keys connecting them with a database of Poland’s settlement network in the 16th century, which together enabled filtering and browsing the information. Such a method of presentation of the source content appears particularly useful in dissemination of the mass sources, which are the medieval and early modern court books.