Our aim is to create a digital platform that uses inventories as a key to explore the living conditions in late medieval and early modern castles. In this article, we want to give an initial insight into the research project in terms of the theme of this volume: how the digital platform we are creating will contribute to engaging the public with material culture projects. We start from the hypothesis that inventories are neither objective nor simple lists of things, but products of an inventory practice, with traces of this activity, found both in the texts and in the materiality of the archival records. They contain a wealth of information on relations between things, people, activities, rooms, and the words used for them. We use digital methods of text recognition to interpret a corpus of 130 castle inventories from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in the historical region of Tyrol (Austria/Italy) as historical sources and on castles as social spaces. With ontological modelling and deduction from the archival records, we want to make the historical practice of creating inventories visible and use the information to explore everyday life at the castles. For selected castles, we will combine historical data with results from building history to create virtual room books. Digital tools will allow presenting the relations of objects, spaces, individuals, actions, and social practices and provide results for the scientific community as well as for the interested public.
Antenhofer, Christina, Gruber-Tokić, Elisabeth, Hiebel, Gerald, Matschinegg, Ingrid, Posch, Claudia and Rampl, Gerhard. "Inventories as Keys to Exploring Castles as Cultural Heritage", Open Archaeology, vol. 11, no. 1, 2025, pp. 20240026. https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2024-0026