BADV (Bavarikon): Measuring culture

Professor Malte Rehbein, Chair of Computational Humanities, and Professor Alexander Werth, Chair of German Linguistics, have secured funding for a project to digitise the Bavarian holdings of the Atlas of German Folklore (ADV). The project, funded by the Bavarian State Library, will run from 2025 to 2027. The aim is to digitise the materials of the Atlas of German Folklore for the state of Bavaria, publish them on the bavarikon internet portal, and catalogue the materials and their collection context in terms of the history of science.

The Atlas of German Folklore, the largest humanities project ever undertaken in Germany covering the entire German-speaking area, aimed to document everyday culture in Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic (surveys conducted between 1930 and 1935), a period that was still pre-industrial in many regions. Through the ADV regional office in Munich, a total of 243 questions (with additional sub-questions) on various topics relating to everyday culture were asked and answered in 1,820 locations in Bavaria, ranging from festive customs and wedding and funeral rituals to eating habits and superstitions.

To date, the ADV has largely remained unevaluated, with only a few maps and analyses being produced and published at the time. ‘With the project funding, we have the opportunity to unearth a huge treasure trove of data, a treasure that hardly anyone in the research landscape has been interested in for decades,’ explains Prof. Dr. Alexander Werth. ‘At the same time, the materials offer us a glimpse into regional everyday cultures that are probably centuries old but have now almost completely disappeared as a result of globalisation, urbanisation and migration.’

Prof. Dr. Malte Rehbein sees the project as a great opportunity to further advance the Laboratory for Cultural Heritage Digitisation, which is based at the Chair of Computational Humanities. ‘We are dealing with a huge collection of mainly handwritten notes and questionnaires, which we now want to process using modern digitisation techniques and make available to the scientific community,’ says Rehbein.

A research collaboration has been established for the project with the Institute for Folklore Studies in Munich at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, where the Bavarian holdings of the ADV are located. Thematically, the project is also linked to the ‘Methodikum’ research centre founded by the Passau chairs of Multilingual Computer Linguistics (Prof. Johann-Mattis List) Computational Humanities (Prof. Dr. Malte Rehbein) and German Linguistics (Prof. Dr. Alexander Werth), which aims to conduct basic methodological research in the humanities and serves as a point of contact for all questions relating to computer-assisted and digital methodology.

Captions:

Image 1: Card index box for the response slips from the questionnaire survey for the Bavarian Atlas of German Folklore; copyright: Pauline Schmidt

Image 2: Response slips for questions 4 and 5 of the questionnaire survey for the Bavarian Atlas of German Folklore; copyright: Pauline Schmidt

This text was machine-translated from German.