The Gebetsbuch Project

The Gebetsbuch Project is a collaboration between the Universität Innsbruck, the University of North Texas, the Tiroler Landesmuseen Ferdinandeum, and the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol.

The aim of the Gebetsbuch Project is to produce a digital transcript and textual pattern analysis of the texts found in the fifteenth-century payer book (Gebetsbuch) Innsbruck, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Cod. FB 3172. It initally began as a shared class Digital Humanities project to cap off the University of Innsbruck MA-level course, UE Historische Hilfswissenschaften und Medienkunde: Introduction to (Gendered) Digital History, taught by Dr. Kathryne Beebe as part of her US Scholar Fulbright-University of Innsbruck Visiting Professorship in the Winter Semester 2024-2025. With thanks to Prof. Eva Pfanzelter for inspiration, the Gebetsbuch Project has expanded well beyond the bounds of a class project.   

In Phase I, published here, the student contributors of the Gebetsbuch Project produced a digital transcript of a section of Cod. FB 3172 and an informative project website to explain the manuscript’s background and context.

This phase was accomplished in four steps:

• Step 1 involved obtaining permission to digitize Cod. FB 3172 and moving it from the Ferdinandeum to the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol. Here, the project would like recognize the generosity of Roland Sila, the Director of the library of the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum and Silvia Gstrein, Head of the Department of Digital Services at the University Library, who made that possible.
• Step 2 saw the digital imaging of the manuscript with a Zeutschel OS Q2 A2+ Overhead Scanner, a process that took about two weeks. Here, the Gebetsbuch Project contributors are grateful to Thomas Krismer, Sabine Ecker, and their colleagues in Digital Services for doing this work and for inviting the class in to see how it was done. Step 2 produced 496 original TIFF images at (600 dpi).
•  Step 3 moved to the transcription of the manuscript text. For transcription, we used the native-Innsbruck-developed AI-assisted transcription software, Transkribus. We set up an online Transkribus collection, to which all students and members of the project had editorial access, and we processed folios 82r-102v, using the transcription model “German_Gothic_Scripts_14th-16th_century” created by Dorothee Huff. Here, we are especially grateful for the assistance of Eva Pfanzelter, Gerhard Rampl, and Mirjam El Attal (who gave us our own Transkribus tutorial in class). This collective work, when finished, directly lead to:
• Step 4:  the fourth and final step — and Phase II of the Gebetsbuch Project — that of computational text analysis. This step is still in the future, as we have found that we must first take a considerable about of time to transcribe and correct our initial twenty folios to create a set of Ground Truth documents that we can then use to train a new AI-model expert in recognizing the writing of our particular manuscript.  When that is finished, and we have a correct transcription of the full 240 folios, we plan to use a digital text analysis software package to look for textual patterns in the manuscript. With this analysis, we aim to expand understanding of the interior devotional and literary world of a fifteenth-century women’s monastic community.