NEW INTERFACES · Visualising Textuality – New Interfaces to Historical Texts

While data and information visualisation is a state-of-the-art topic for statistical data in many disciplines, it still is a desideratum in text-based research in the Humanities. The primary goal of the research project “Visualising Textuality – New Interfaces to Historical Texts” is to explore new forms of representation and visualisation of complex texts, textual relations and structures to be used for scholarly research – text-based data that is traditionally disseminated by means of scholarly editions. The innovative processes and interfaces to text, developed in this project, will enhance traditional forms of representation and allow scholars and lay readers to become more skilful, better-informed readers and to make up their own minds about utterance and text.The research project does not deal with texts written with print design in mind, but with historical texts, never intended to be printed. These texts are often of complex nature, non-linear, multi-dimensional and of unending variation. This complexity derives as well from the cognitive process of textual production as from the dissemination of text(s) in space and time. For medieval documents, this can be observed e.g. in commentaries of theological texts.The project will explore methods, techniques and technologies that answer questions of complexity in text-based research. It will develop new forms of representation and multi-dimensional visualisation of textual complexity, advanced interfaces for human-computer interaction and interoperability with other resources. It will, however, not stay on a theoretical level. Its second objective is to create “knowledge sites” of two important historical documents which future researchers can employ for their own studies. As case-studies, two manuscripts containing Old-Irish glosses (8th Century) from the Würzburg library are chosen.