About

Legal sources are the foundation for the history of criminal law and historical crime research and have many references to a variety of research fields, such as everyday life, mentality and gender studies, which are particularly interested in the legal practice.

As part of a DFG-Projektes led by Dirk Alvermann, legal sources from the southern Baltic Sea Region were digitised between 2019 and 2021 and automatically deciphered and transcribed (HTR) on the Transkribus platform. This means that the legal instructions and judgements of the Greifswald Faculty of Law from 1580-1893 (102,000 pages), the justifications of the judges at the Wismar Tribunal from 1746-1845 (130,000 pages) and the justifications oft he judges of the Wismar Council Court from 1701-1879 (25,000 pages) are now available.

We have documented our work with Transkribus in detail in a project blog on our website.

The project involved cooperation between the Greifswald University Archive, the Archive of the Hanseatic City of Wismar, the State Archive of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Greifswald University Library and READ-Coop.

Acknowledgements

Our thanks go to the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the financial support of the project. We would also like to thank the Transkribus team in Innsbruck and the READ-Coop for providing us with all the support we needed. Above all, however, we would like to thank our dedicated colleagues in Greifswald and Wismar who, over a period of two years, have contributed everything to the success of our project (in alphabetical order): Dirk Alvermann, Bruno Blüggel, Anna Brandt, Holger Dalm, Franka Fischer, Mara Geyer, André Gschweng, Frederika Hahne, Lisa Heigl, Nils Jörn, Matthias Kühn, Antje Laasch, Patricia Settgast, Kirsten Schäffner, Marike Zenke.