Dear Digital Medievalists

I'm glad to inform you about a database which might be of some interest to those of you working on the late eleventh century, the investiture conflict or papal history.

Today, I've finished and published a database collecting and containing information on where and in which collections/contexts the letters of pope Gregory VII were transmitted.

www.g7ldb.history.uni-tuebingen.de

No full text of any letter is included (yet?) but nevertheless you can do rather advanced search queries. There are also a synopsis of letters and collections and a visualisation of the transmission. Both show ALL elements by default, but are designed to display your selection of items.

I appreciate any feedback, via mail or the forms at the bottom of each page in the database.

For those of you rather interested in the technical side, just a few words: The raw data is all in XML, with some elements in TEI. Wherever possible, static HTML pages are created via XSLT. Search and synopsis and visualisation of user selections are also done with XSLT, but in real time on the server using Saxon/C. PHP is used to manage these transformations and also the user sessions. eXist or any other XML database is nowhere involved. I guess, this solution is somehow “unorthodox”, but after all: It's working! (At least, I hope so.)

I hope, the database is of some use at least to some of you!

Best regards Christian

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Dr. Christian Schwaderer (Akademischer Mitarbeiter)

Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen Philosophische Fakultät Fachbereich Geschichtswissenschaft Seminar für mittelalterliche Geschichte Wilhelmstraße 36 (Hegelbau)· 72074 Tübingen · Germany Zimmer 212 Telefon +49 7071 29-72990· Telefax +49 7071 29-5905 christian.schwaderer@uni-tuebingen.de