Court sources are the basis for the history of criminal law and historical crime research, which relate to everyday life, mentality and gender studies and corresponding questions. They are oriented in particular to legal practice.
With our project we want to digitize three complete collections of such legal sources: 102.000 pages of legal instructions of the Greifswald Faculty of Law (1580-1800), 130.000 pages of opinions of the judges at the Wismar Tribunal (1746-1845) as well as 25.000 pages of opinions of the judges of the Wismar Council Court (1701-1879).
This project is a cooperation between the University Archive Greifswald, the Archive of the Hanseatic City of Wismar, the State Archive of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the University Library Greifswald and the READ-COOP. The project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
The sources are, at best, sorted merely chronologically or according to claimants and defendants. An additional indexing regarding content is therefore useful.
However, we will not only add structure and metadata to the given material by means of the digital enrichment that has been customary so far. In addition, we will enable a full text search in the file material itself with the help of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Keyword Spotting (KWS).