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

定性与定量双重视角下的区域经济发展——19世纪漫长的德国商会开放获取年度报告

• 批准号: 529670445
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Achim Bonte
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Generaldirektion
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/529670445?language=en
• 关键词: Regional; economic; development; qualitative; quantitative

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.

德国173个商会在漫长的19世纪中的年度报告具有很高的原始价值，但迄今为止，研究者对它们的关注却很有限。这可能首先是由于自19世纪30年代以来，德国各邦向主管部委提交的商会报告的可获得性令人困惑。由于这些报告是在图书行业之外出版的，因此通常只在地方或区域一级由档案馆和图书馆收集。特别是在商会历史报告保存零散的背景下，提高商会历史报告的可见性和可得性显得尤为迫切。更重要的是，这种来源类型在1871年后变得越来越标准化，适合作为经济，社会和商业历史领域定性和定量研究设计的基础，以及数字人文学科混合方法的应用。由于其特有的两部分结构-口头描述区域经济状况之后是关于工业、贸易、商业和就业发展数据的统计估计。为了为这些研究视角奠定基础，该项目一方面旨在数字化并永久公开柏林国家图书馆（SBB）的杰出收藏，这些收藏是截至1918年报告的德国商会年度报告。这一系列的特殊质量反映在德国联合系列目录中这类文本的总语料库的80%左右。为了弥补馆藏的不足，SBB打算在实际项目期间之后，从自己的资源中为研究人员提供一笔资金，根据需要，可以从其他图书馆的馆藏中数字化丢失的商会报告卷。除了核心目标外，该项目还旨在为后续项目奠定基础，该项目将专注于开发基于数字化商会报告的情感检测和自动表格提取的OCR程序。