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世纪中，德国173个商会的年度报告具有很高的来源价值，迄今为止，这与研究人员对它们的有限关注形成了鲜明对比。这可能首先是由于自19世纪30年代以来，商会提交给德国各州负责部门的报告的可得性令人困惑。由于这些报告是在图书贸易之外出版的，因此这些报告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在保存方面支离破碎的背景下，提高商会历史报告的可见性和可得性似乎迫在眉睫。尤其是在1871年之后，这一来源类型变得越来越标准化，适合作为经济、社会和商业历史领域的定性和定量研究设计的基础，以及数字人文学科的混合方法方法的应用。由于其特点的两部分结构-口头描述区域经济形势之后是一个统计附录，其中包括工业，贸易，商业和就业发展的数据。为了为这些研究视角奠定基础，该项目一方面旨在数字化柏林国家图书馆（SBB）的德国商会年度报告的杰出收藏，并使其永久公开访问，直到1918年报告年度。该系列的特殊质量反映在德国联合系列目录中此类文本的总语料库的80%左右的覆盖率上。为了弥补其馆藏的不足，SBB打算在实际项目结束后，从自身资源中为研究人员提供一项基金，以便根据其他图书馆馆藏的需要，将缺失的商会报告数字化。除了其核心目标之外，本项目还旨在为后续项目奠定基础，该项目将重点开发基于数字化商会报告的情感检测和自动表提取的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.