Regional economic development in a qualitative-quantitative dual perspective – the annual reports of German Chambers of Commerce of the long 19th century in open access

在漫长的19世纪，德国173个商会的年度报告具有很高的来源价值，这与研究人员对它们有限的关注形成了鲜明的对比。这可能首先是由于自19世纪30年代以来提交给格尔曼各州主管部委的商会报告的可用性问题令人困惑的情况。由于它们是在图书贸易之外出版的，这些报告通常只由档案馆和图书馆在地方或区域一级收集。尤其是在其保存状况支离破碎的背景下，提高历史商会报告的可见性和可用性似乎是当务之急。这种在1871年以后逐渐标准化的来源类型尤其适合作为经济、社会和商业史领域的定性和定量研究设计的基础，也适合应用数字人文学科的混合方法方法，因为其特点是两部分结构--口头描述地区经济形势之后是带有工业、贸易、商业和就业发展数据的统计附件。为了为这种研究视角奠定基础，该项目一方面旨在将柏林统计局(SBB)截至报告年度的德国商会年度报告的杰出收藏数字化，并使其永久公开可用。这一集的特殊质量反映在德国联邦丛书目录中这类文本总语料库的80%左右的覆盖率上。为了弥补收藏上的空白，SBB打算从自己的资源中为研究人员提供一笔资金，甚至在实际项目期之后也是如此，从中可以根据需要从其他图书馆的藏书中将遗失的商会报告卷数字化。除了其核心目标外，该项目还旨在为后续项目奠定基础，该项目将专注于在数字化商会报告的基础上开发情感检测和马季奇表格自动提取的OCR程序。

The high source value of the annual reports of the 173 chambers of commerce in Germany over the long 19th century is thus far in striking contrast with the limited attention paid to them by researchers. This is probably due above all to the confusing situation regarding the availa-bility of the chamber of commerce reports submitted to the responsible ministries of the Ger-man states from the 1830s onwards. Since they were published outside the book trade, these reports were usually collected only at local or regional level by archives and libraries. Espe-cially against the background of their fragmented situation in terms of preservation, the im-provement of the visibility and availability of the historical chamber of commerce reports seems urgently needed. This is all the more so, as this source genre, which became increas-ingly standardised after 1871, is suitable as a basis for both qualitative and quantitative study designs in the fields of economic, social and business history, as well as for the application of mixed methods approaches of the digital humanities, due to its characteristic two-part struc-ture – the verbal description of the regional economic situation is followed by a statistical ap-pendix with data on the development of industry, trade, commerce and employment. In order to lay the foundation for such research perspectives, the project aims on the one hand to digitise and make permanently openly accessible the outstanding collection of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB) of annual reports of German chambers of commerce up to the reporting year 1918. The special quality of this collection is reflected in the coverage of around 80% of the total corpus of this type of text in the German union catalogue of serials. In order to close the gaps in its collection the SBB intends to make a fund available to research-ers from its own resources even beyond the actual project period, from which missing vol-umes of chamber of commerce reports can be digitised on demand from the holdings of oth-er libraries. Besides its core objective, this project also aims to lay the foundation for a follow-up project, which will focus on the development of OCR procedures for sentiment detection and auto-matic table extraction on the basis of the digitised chamber of commerce reports.