Digitizing Cultural Discourses. Baedeker Travel Guides 1875 - 1914

The Baedeker project, presented in this proposal,
is initiated within the framework of the Austrian Academy Corpus, a research department at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The sub corpus comprises first editions of German travel guidebooks brought out by the Baedeker publishing house between 1845 and 1914. The texts cover exclusively non-European destinations.
Today they are rare, which is due to low print runs.
The aim of the project is threefold: 1) it partly deals with
the genre from a literary point of view, 2) it looks
at travel guides as cultural historical resources as well as artefacts that represent various discourses on culture, and 3) it examines the capacities of digital resources.
Travel guidebooks, not regarded as a literary form
in their own right within the classical canon, played
a minor role in comparison with travel narratives for
a long time. Substantial contributions to the historical
development of the genre and its specific language of
expression are still few. Even postcolonial literary criticism
cannot be regarded as an exception in this respect.
Surprisingly enough, few approaches appreciate the
importance and impact of this genre on the establishment
and maintenance of Orientalist discourses and colonial
practises. Linguistic accounts mostly concentrate
on contemporary travel guides and exclude historical development and change. Thus, digital versions of early travel guidebooks can provide an incentive to improve both comparative linguistic and literary genre studies.
Furthermore, research on tourism history, its influence on modern society, its bearing on social and cultural change has increased quantitatively in many fields of the humanities since the 1980s: history in general, art
history, colonial studies, social and cultural anthropology,
economics, geography and tourism studies, today an
accepted sub branch of sociology. In these disciplines it goes without saying that travel guidebooks are valuable sources. Nonetheless, they are often dealt with as sources among many others. (The few exceptions are e.g. James
Buzard 1993; Kathleen R. Epelde 2004, Sabine
Gorsemann 1995, Rudy Koshar 2000 and the research group Türschau 16 1998.)
The Baedeker, appearing from 1832 onwards, set the standard and defeated all competition both inside and outside the German-speaking countries. One cannot talk about travel guides without Baedeker coming to mind. During the first decades of the Baedekers, the focus was on Europe. However, they were issued for non-European
destinations as well, an aspect missing from critical
literature. The guides in the Baedeker-Corpus cover
a variety of regions such as Palestine and Syria
(1875), Lower and Upper Egypt (1877, 1891), North America and Mexico (1883), Asia Minor (1905), the Mediterranean coastline of Africa (1909) as well as
India (1914). Dealing with a wide range of cultural
environments the “Tourist Gaze” upon the “Other” has to be scrutinized in greater depth. Assuming that
images of the “Other” reflect cultural self-perception to a great extent, travel guidebooks tell at least as much about the “Self” as about the “Other”. For well known reasons, none of the components involved here can be taken for granted as precise, unambiguous or fixed and
independent entities. Taking this argument seriously, self-images - like all the other components - are to be understood as flexible phenomena. Moving away from the very frequent restriction on one region or country the Baedeker project turns towards a wider geographical diversification to explore the German repertoire of how one used to speak at the turn of the 19th century about one’s own culture, and at the same time, that of others.
As concerns the digital methods by which these
phenomena are to be investigated, the following has to be pointed out: while XML is now an accepted standard
for the creation and exchange of digital data, it is
necessary to move towards a closer consideration of
domain-specific XML vocabularies. All Baedekers have undergone scanning, OCR and basic XML annotation
as usual with all AAC projects. The task at hand is to devise a schema to markup the features of the Baedekers, relevant for their role in travel history. Existing standards like AnthML and Archaeological Markup Language are focused on material artefacts. A markup language which considers immaterial cultural aspects is missing
so far. As a matter of course the development of a
standardized language needs the expertise of the wider
scholarly community and has to be a team effort - a
requirement not feasible within one institution. Thus, the Baedeker project should be seen as a small contribution in preparing such a markup language, designing a sub-set of tags focusing on a well defined segment of cultural life.
The main challenge is encoding what travel guides are
essentially supposed to do, namely introducing foreign
cultures and people/s, recommending an itinerary,
assessing sites and festivals, cultural and social
conditions, suggesting modes and attitudes of
behaviour to adopt in these places and on these occasions.
Since cultural knowledge as well as recommendations,
valuations, stereotypes or comparisons often is
articulated in an implicit manner, which is difficult to encode, the project targets subject-matters such as
people/s, languages and religions, social, political,
and other cultural concepts as well as sights being
recommended, valuated, stereotyped, and compared
in the travel guides. As an example I will refer to the repertoire of “group designations”, be it ethnic, national, social, religious, political, and occupational, showing how they relate to the historical discourse on culture. The paper will demonstrate that subject-matters can be easily marked up, they allow for an appropriate access to context - i.e. different routes to topics and explicit as well as implicit knowledge - and they provide a basis for comparative analysis. In addition, this strategy separates
annotation from interpretation and limits the risk of
encoding preconceived assumptions.
Detailed domain-specific markup can be applied to
other texts dealing with similar topics - to primary and secondary sources, historical as well as contemporary.
In this respect the Baedeker can be seen as a starting point. Using open standards allows for ongoing quality
enhancement and adjustment. XML annotation, in this sense, is not a single-serving tool, but a permanent
enrichment, accessible and shareable with the wider scholarly community. Retrieval results can be reviewed by different scholars, paving the way for reinterpretation and new questions. It is expected that differing results will come from the same markup.