SOURCE DIGITIZATION: Iurisprudentia (Zürich: University of Zürich, Lehrstuhl Privatrecht (ZGB))

 

On the project:

«iurisprudentia» is a project of the chair for private law with focus on the Swiss Civil Code, University of Zurich, Prof. Dr. Walter Boente. The goal of the project is to make the text corpus «Law» growing since hundreds of years and made up of documents about the law-making process, case law and doctrine of law digitally (more) available and exploitable. The initial focus of the project lays on historic documents of german law, austrian law and swiss law. After successful completion of this pilot phase, however, and in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Jakob Fortunat Stagl other legal systems are planned to be included and international partnerships to be established. Most of the documents targeted by the project are dispersed in archives and libraries and are often only accessible on site, partly under special conditions and almost always with restrictive opening hours. Even if a digital copy of these documents already exists, these are again scattered on different platforms, unfitted for law content, with their own access rules or different technical environment. Full-text searchability of the documents is only rarely possible, and searchability or even transcription of handwritten texts is only available in exceptional cases. Therefore, the project «iurisprudentia» aims to digitalize legal texts and to gather already digitalized texts in one place. The documents will be recognized in full text and if handwritten, automatically transcribed with varying, sometimes surprisingly high levels of accuracy. With «iurisprudentia» the digital copies and the so gathered text corpus will leave the limits of local desks and become freely available «at the click of a mouse», fully searchable, selectable and editable for jurists and historians. At the same time (computational) linguistics gains a new research object since contemporary law texts are often hidden behind paywalls and the historical text corpus «Law» has never been accessible to this extent. For now, only sample editions are available on «iurisprudentia». The content of these editions is still incomplete and is primarily intended to illustrate the concept of the platform and its technical possibilities. At the moment academic supervision is still being sought for a great number of the editions. Beyond that, «iurisprudentia» can be endlessly extended by further editions with only little technical expenditures. We are also very grateful for any suggestions in this matter to iurisprudentia@rwi.uzh.ch . The project has been considerably supported by Prof. Dr. Tobias Hodel, Digital Humanities, Walter Benjamin Kolleg, University of Bern, Mag. iur. Bernhard Dengg, Head of the department Law and Economics, Library of the University of Bern, and Dr. Andrea Malits, Head of the department Data Services and Open Access, College library Zurich. An early inspiration for this platform is the platform repertorium.at of Dr. Heino Speer. We are very grateful to all of them. The digital copies were partly prepared by the responsible editors or came from different libraries and archives, as individually indicated in the metadata of the respective documents. Without the digital copies of those platforms and institutions as well as the broad support of their archivists and librarians, projects like this one would not be possible. Thank you! Precondition for the initiation, success and continuation of this project is the software Transkribus, which enabled the content indexation of the documents at this large scale in the first place. As representatives of the whole Transkribus Team our warm thanks go to Günter Mühlberger, Andreas Stauder and Berthold Ulreich. For the graphic design we thank Mr. Berthold Ulreich again as well as Mr. Raphael Schoen and Mr. Dominik Huber from the Department Scientific Visualization and Visual Communication (SIVIC) of the University of Zurich. The programming of this page is built on the Read&Search-Platform of Transkribus . For the adaptation of the front display to the purposes of our project our heartfelt thanks go to Mag. iur. Marwan Ezzat (Lead programmer) as well as to the generous support of the Department for IT-Projects at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich. Our thanks go to its representative for the whole team that has been involved in this project, Mr. Silas Weber, MSc, Head IT-Projects RWF. Feedback, including suggestions for improvement, are highly appreciated and can be directed to the following email address: iurisprudentia@rwi.uzh.ch .

Consult the "labor version" here.