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In his 2014 volume on Swedish Royal Police Ordinances, Toomas Kotkas describes: "In Germany the term Policeyordnungen came to denote imperial and territorial police code which included a vast body of provisions concerning the maintenance of good police." (p.2). Good police was basically a synonym for good order, meaning that it was a broad term to denote anything that had to do with shaping society towards what was deemed 'good'. It could include societal order (incl. social, economic, moral and religious spheres) - (Kotkas 2014: 1). These texts can be found throughout the European mainland and cover a wide range of topics. These topics are an indication of what was perceived as problematic and harmful behaviour, activities or situations. These texts were published from the later Middle Ages until approximately the 1800s. Since these texts were not limited to a single country, but could easily be copied from one area to an other area (at least that is one of our hypotheses) it would be interesting to be able to exchange data and make it interoperable.
As a community/project we want to:
- establish a general data model for early modern ordinances
- specify recommended authority data sources
- map data from multiple projects to the common data model
- make multiple databases of early modern ordinances accessible/searchable
- either by establishing a hub that stores (transformed) copies of data coming from multiple databases
- or by establishing a federated search interface that sends out requests to distributed databases in the background
We proceed in various ways and it is up to everyone to decide for themselves in which role and to which extent they want to participate: We try to have group calls every two months in order to keep each other updated on progress and news. A smaller steering group convenes more often if it is necessary.
We approach some of the tasks with a so-called "agile" method: In certain phases we hold one-week "sprint" events in which some (technical) contributors collaboratively develop solutions and other (non-technical) contributors give feedback.
Currently, we are gathering concrete, "actionable" knowledge about all the different research projects and data collections. For doing so, we have prepared a very simple google forms questionnaire and even for non-technical researchers, it should be really easy to enter some information there. So,
... to contribute some "user stories": fill in some very short (ideally one or two sentences) descriptions in plain, non-technical language of (a) what information your data (prospectively) contains and (b) what questions you would like to put to the resulting database. This will help us develop a data model that is tailored to the requirements of the user community rather than to what any developer thinks may be the "essence" and "qualities" of police ordinances. Here is a simple form in which you can do so. (You can find some example user stories of either type in the questionnaire.)
The stories you enter will be automatically collected and transferred to our project's list of issues.
- Annemieke Romein (KNAW Huygens ING)
- Andreas Wagner (MPILHLT)
- Saskia Limbach (University of Göttingen)
- Karl Härter (MPILHLT)
- Nicolas Simon (UCLouvain)
- Pascale Sutter (SSRQ)
- Heikki Pihlajamäki (Helsinki)
- Marco Cicchini (Genève)
- Fernanda Olival (Evora)
- add your name here
Via this google form, you can register your e-mail address and we will invite you to join our technical developments or to provide us with more user-focussed feedback once these developments have yielded some results.
Otherwise, you can also send a message anytime to wagner@lhlt.mpg.de (Andreas) or Annemieke.Romein@Huygens.knaw.nl (Annemieke).