XQuerying the medieval Dubrovnik

A demonstration of XQuery searches in the TEI XML edition of the Reformationes Ragusii 1390-1392. To learn about it, start from the Wiki.

MHR in XML

The archival series of decisions and deliberations made by the three administrative councils of Dubrovnik consist of hundreds of handwritten volumes, predominantly in Latin and still not published in its entirety, spanning the period from 1301 until 1808 (the year the Republic of Ragusa was abolished by Napoleon’s Marshal Auguste de Marmont).

In collaboration with the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Historical Sciences – Dubrovnik, which is the current publisher of the series Monumenta historica Ragusina (MHR), we have undertaken a pilot project of converting to TEI XML the Volume 6 of MHR, an edition of the so-called Reformationes of Dubrovnik councils from the years 1390-1392 prepared by Nella Lonza and Zdravko Šundrica in 2005.

Different salient points of the Reformationes (meetings, names of persons and places, dates, values and measures, themes, textual annotations) are being marked and the markup decisions are carefully documented, all with the intention of enabling XQuery searches through the BaseX XML database.

Resources

This site offers support for a paper submitted to the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative. We provide links to an introductory essay by Nella Lonza, to a TEI Conference 2013 presentation by Neven Jovanović, a Bitbucket repository with a wiki, and a BaseX server where the queries can be run on a database instance.