Archive and narration

The estate of the Austrian author Gerhard Roth at the Franz Nabl Institute of the University of Graz comprises, in addition to his entire literary archive, around 40,000 photographs from the period from 1977 to 2017, which will be newly indexed and made accessible in a systematic form through this project.

After an initial review of the photo collection, the question arose as to how this heterogeneous collection (from everyday to research to art photography and from slides to prints to digital images) could be described as a whole. We decided to translate the image content of each individual photograph into language, i.e. to find terms for the systematic keywording of all the photos. In this way, a controlled vocabulary emerged from the material. This so-called "dictionary of images" lists all the photographs in the collection as of July 2019 and offers a completely new way of accessing them. The transformation into a different medium - from image to language - is of central importance for the creation of this digital photo archive. It forms the basis for presentation, search, navigation and selection.

Around 200 keywords in various combinations now represent 40,000 images. The profanity of the terms has been deliberately chosen as it serves to make the collection more accessible. The individual keywords are not ranked in the "Dictionary of Images" according to their frequency of occurrence, but are presented in equal order. However, they are grouped according to content, which provides orientation and opens up new paths through the archive.

The project was carried out from September 2017 to January 2020 by Silvana Cimenti and Elisabeth Zehetner under the direction of Klaus Kastberger as part of the HRSM project "KONDE - Kompetenznetzwerk Digitale Edition". The conception and technical implementation of the online database took place in collaboration with Carina Koch from the Center for Information Modelling - Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities.

The basis for the transfer of the collection into a digital photo archive was preliminary work that had been carried out in recent years as part of the cataloging and research of Gerhard Roth's bequest collection at the Franz Nabl Institute. The collection was largely digitized and arranged and indexed according to Gerhard Roth's captions and the RNA. The inventory supervisor, Daniela Bartens, has carried out and managed these projects with students and is available at the Franz Nabl Institute for questions about the digital photo archive and the possibilities of its use at daniela.bartens(at)uni-graz.at.

Link to the database: Gerhard Roth Photo Archive (uni-graz.at) [Access for research purposes is possible with access data].