The Digital Tabula Imperii Byzantini (DigTIB) – Towards a Digital Archive of the TIB
The digital initiative of the Long-Term Project "Tabula Imperii Byzantini (TIB)" of the
Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna entitled "Maps of Power:
Historical Atlas of Places,
Borderzones and Migration Dynamics in Byzantium" is
using the software CollectiveAccess in order to present its slides and black-and-white
photographs, which are kept in the TIB Archive in Vienna (Austria), to the public and
the
scholarly community.
The establishment of the present platform has been enabled by the third-party funded
project
"Die
digitale Tabula Imperii Byzantini (Dig-TIB) als Beitrag zum Weltkulturerbe"
(Project of
the Jubiläumsfonds of the Österreichische Nationalbank No. 17771) at the Austrian
Academy of Sciences.
Its project leader Mihailo St. Popović and his project team Veronika Polloczek, Bernhard
Koschicek, Alexander Watzinger, Jelena Nikić, Florian Wiltschnig and Jan Belik have
developed a web design, a logo, a framework as well as a workflow and, thus, a "best
practice" for the processing of the analogue TIB data. For the time being, three
sub-collections of the TIB Archive have been embedded with the respective metadata into
CollectiveAccess, namely:
- "Cilicia and Isauria" (TIB 5, Friedrich Hild, published 1990)
- "Eastern Thrace (Eurōpē)" (TIB 12, Andreas Külzer, published 2008)
- "Macedonia, Northern Part" (TIB 16, Mihailo St. Popović, to be published 2022)
These sub-collections represent altogether 7,172 slides of about 52,000 slides in total,
which are preserved in the TIB Archive. It is a first step towards creating a Digital
Archive of the TIB (DigTIB), which shall be pursued in the near future as part of the
"Maps
of Power" initiative.
We are very grateful to the Österreichische Nationalbank for its support and for
enabling us to establish the basis of our future scholarly endeavour.
Mihailo St. Popović,
PI of the "Maps of Power" initiative