Documentation

Basic information

Since 2000, the University of Graz has been placing a strategic focus on South Eastern European Studies. As one of the activities of this research focus, the Visual Archive Southeastern Europe (VASE) – which collects historical and contemporary visual material from Southeastern Europe – was launched in 2012 as a collaboration of the Centre for Southeastern European Studies and the Centre for Information Modeling (ZIM) at the University of Graz.

Since May 2022 the portal is redesigned, which affects both the interface and the underlying data model. The redesign is implemented by the ZIM and funded by the Center for the Study of Balkan Societies and Cultures and the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences

By providing access to different types of images – e.g. photographs, postcards, posters, and newspaper clippings – VASE aims to draw special attention to the image as a primary source of historical anthropological research. Thus, it complements the predominantly text-based research and promotes the reflection on (self-)images of Southeastern Europe both in the academic community and in society in general. VASE currently comprises four collections: The first project – Visualizing Family, Gender Relations and the Body. The Balkans approx. 1860-1950 – was launched in 2012 and led by the late Karl Kaser. Over the following years, the archive was expanded by three additional collections: A Visual Approach to Explore Everyday Life in Turkish and Yugoslav Cities, 1920s and 1930s (2015-2018) conducted in cooperation with the University of Basel, Balkan Cinema (initiated by Kaser in 2015) and Postcarding Nation, Language and Identities: Lower Styria on Picture Postcards 1885-1920 (2019) in cooperation with the Institute of Slavic Studies. VASE at this point includes 5130 objects with a total of 9098 images. A core part of VASE, besides the visual sources, is the description and contextualization of the images: Extensive metadata (e.g. format and image type of the source, creator(s), repository storing the original, editor(s)), essential image information, context of creation and reception, keywords from the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM) ethnographic classification system, and references to related image objects were recorded.

Repository

The project was implemented using GAMS (Humanities' Asset Management System), a large digital repository infrastructure maintained by the ZIM that specializes in the preservation, management, and presentation of digital research data from the arts, humanities and cultural studies. All data was archived in the system under a PID (Persistent Identifier) and is thus available in a stable referenceable manner.

Redesign

The redesign has significantly improved the usability and accessibility of the research data. Originally, VASE was not envisioned to be a portal hosting different collections – the redesign revised the information architecture and conceptualized VASE as an overall portal aiming at user-friendly cross-project search strategies (e. g. the facetted search or the visualization of the encoded places on a map), while preserving the integrity of each subordinate collection. The revision also involved a move from the CSS framework YAML to the more up-to-date framework Bootstrap, which supports responsive web development.

Data model

In the course of the redesign, a data model was developed that is based on the TEI standard. The newly developed data model is based on the TEI element <object>, which was newly introduced in version 3.5.0 of the TEI P5 Guidelines and is basically intended to map the same content as <msDesc>. Within <objectIdentifier>, the country, place, repository and inventory number are specified (<country>, <placeName>, <repository> and <idno>). In <physDesc>, the object type (<objectType>) and the material (<material>) are specified within <p> elements. The <objectDesc> contains information about the form (@form, e.g. “Carte de visite”) and dimensions (<supportDesc>) of the image material.

However, the elements allowed so far within <object> did not yet reflect all our needs. So the element <objectContents> (analogous to <msContents>) was defined internally within the project, which contains text-based object descriptions or comments within <ab>.