Finance, law and the language of governmental practice in late medieval towns: Aberdeen and Augsburg in comparison

这个项目解决了如何理解中世纪晚期西欧城镇的语言、术语和政府实践的思想的问题。它通过对巴伐利亚州奥格斯堡和较小的苏格兰城市阿伯丁最近创建的资源进行新的分析来做到这一点。阿伯丁的记录拥有联合国教科文组织英国指定地位。由共同申请人牵头的以前的合作项目已经创建了不同类型的城市行政记录--主要是奥格斯堡的财务分类账簿(1320-1466/70)和阿伯丁的主要法律委员会登记册(1398-1511)--文本内容的数字抄本。现在的机会是将这些资源进行比较，并对其内容进行深入的历史驱动的分析，同时发展中世纪时期的德国和苏格兰史学可以从更直接的学术对话中受益的方式。审查将涉及奥格斯堡和阿伯丁记录的以下方面：(1)在这两个城市活跃的财务管理术语和概念；(2)法律-司法管理的术语和概念(同样，在两个城市)；在这两个案例中，询问是否有共同的治理词汇，特别是关于法律和金融的词汇；以及(3)如何最好地解决对这两个XML数据集进行结构化比较的方法挑战。这两个XML资源的TEI格式意味着比较是可能的；语言技术员RF的作用将在应用现有工具和设计新的自动分析技术以支持历史查询、实现对相关术语的语料库规模检查和推进重要的数字人文领域方面至关重要。

This project addresses the problem of how to understand the languages, terminology and ideas of governmental practice in western European towns in the later middle ages. It does so through new analysis of recently created resources for the Bavarian city of Augsburg and the smaller Scottish burgh of Aberdeen. The Aberdeen records hold UNESCO UK designation status. Preceding collaborative projects led by the co-applicants have created digital transcriptions of the textual contents of different types of urban administrative record – the mainly financial ledger books of Augsburg (1320-1466/70) and the mainly legal council registers of Aberdeen (1398-1511). The opportunity now is to place these resources in comparison and undertake deep historically driven analysis of their content, and simultaneously to develop the ways in which German and Scottish historiographies of the medieval period can benefit from more direct academic dialogue. The examination will address the following aspects of the Augsburg and Aberdeen records: (1) what were the terminology and ideas of financial administration active in both towns; (2) what were the terminology and ideas of legal-juridical administration (again, in both towns); in both cases asking was there a shared vocabulary of governance, particularly concerning law and finance; and (3) how best to address the methodological challenge of a structured comparison of these two XML data sets. The TEI-format of both XML resources means the comparison is possible; the role of the language technician RF will be vital in applying existing tools and designing new techniques for automatic analysis to support historical enquiry, and enabling a corpus-scale examination of the relevant terminology and advancing an important field of digital humanities.