The Imperial Diet of Regensburg of 1576 - a Pilot Project on the Digital Edition of sources on the Early Modern Era

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What dynamics the digital transformation has gained in recent years in basic research in the humanities is impressively illustrated by the history of this research project. While at the beginning of the project (2018), very few archives gave permission to third parties to use their digital images free of charge, the situation has changed fundamentally. Since autumn 2020, the project team has been in talks with several archives holding source material central to the Imperial Diet of 1576. They all have granted permission to include the images that are already in our ‘secondary archive’, reproductions of manuscripts that have been collected for research purposes during the project, and thus to make them publicly accessible. The addition of these images would represent a substantial increase in the final quality of the present research, as they would expand the edition and, through their inclusion, both benefit from and demonstrate the added value of digital editing and the new editorial approach pursued in the project. Now, with the help of standardised metadata and highresolution images, it is possible to bring ‘into the picture’ all the lost bits that fell to the wayside during editorial selection in print editing. This substantially increases the openness and flexibility of the edition for answering different questions and pursuing new methodological approaches. Source materials which touch on highly relevant topics, such as currency issues or the manifestations of confessional dissent and how it was dealt with, could previously only be presented marginally, given the total amount of files. Now, they can be made integrally accessible. In this way, we can more fully understand the Imperial Diet as a locus for Europe-wide political communication as well as the deliberative practices at Regensburg, and the people who came to the city with their concerns and requests, from humble peasants to the Duke of Savoy, are brought into the picture. More examples could be provided. The proposed project aims to enrich the already produced research data with digital facsimiles in order to make these valuable resources widely accessible in the form of a digital edition, as well as to discuss this practice and the underlying technology in the context of digital transformations in historical research.