The Koelhoff Chronicle (Cronica van der hilliger Stat van Coellen) as a digital teaching-learning project
I am currently pursuing a joint digital teaching-learning project with several colleagues at different universities, the aim of which is to collaboratively edit the so-called "Koelhoff Chronicle" (Cronica van der hilliger Stat van Coellen). The project currently involves cooperation with medievalists (Prof. Dr. Carla Meyer-Schlenkrich, WWU Münster, Department of Westphalian Regional History and Paul Schweitzer-Martin, LMU Munich, Department of History), librarians (Dr. Henning Dreyling and Jürgen Lenzing, ULB Münster, Department of Historical Collections and Digitisation) and a service provider for scientific data acquisition, data processing and presentation (Christoph Forster, datalino Berlin).
The chronicle is over 700 pages long and was typeset, printed and at the same time lavishly illustrated in the Cologne Offizin of Johann Koelhoff the Younger between January and August 1499. Today, 209 copies of this print have survived. The surviving copies are scattered all over the world and are kept in 23 countries. Even if the distribution radius of the Chronicle was smaller in its time of origin, the ownership entries and surviving copies indicate an interesting distribution of the print. The chronicle printed in 1499 is considered the oldest printed city chronicle ever and, despite its importance for media, historiography and city history, has only been treated cursorily in research; a modern edition is lacking. The older edition from 1867 and 1877 presented by Hermann Cardauns as part of the series "Die Chroniken der deutschen Städte vom 14. Bis ins 16. Jahrhundert" is completely inadequate.
This is where the teaching-learning project begins. The aim is to digitally index Koelhoff's extensive chronicle over several semesters and at several universities. Together with students, the text of the chronicle will be transcribed using the digital tool 'Transkribus'. The transcriptions will be published digitally on a specially designed website and names, dates and places will be identified, tagged and annotated. The results of the course will be made available through the low-threshold, digital offer not only to the research community but also to the interested public and thus communicated to today's city community and beyond.
Editing Cologne Documents
In the summer semester of 2014, I developed a model seminar "Editing Cologne Documents", which is taught at the University of Cologne by Dr Joachim Oepen (Archive of the Archdiocese of Cologne) and me. This is a teaching-learning project based on the principle of research-based learning that enables students to create and publish digital editions of charters. The platform used for this is monasterium.net, where document editions created by Cologne students in our exercises have already been published. In addition, I have published a monograph together with Dr. Ursula Gießmann (Centre for Higher Education Didactics, University of Cologne) on the topics of 'research-based learning' and 'digital teaching' in higher education didactics.
Publications:
together with Joachim Oepen and students of the University of Cologne:
25 charters on monasterium.net collaborative archive: Stift St. Maria im Kapitol [22 already online; 05.10.2020].
in collaboration with Ursula Gießmann:
„Digitale Lehre in den historischen Geisteswissenschaften – hochschuldidaktisch betrachtet“, in: Hochschule digital.innovativ | #digiPH Tagungsband zur 1. Online-Tagung, hg. v. Marlene Miglbauer, Lene Kieberl und Stefan Schmid, Graz 2018, S. 133–141.
in collaboration with Ursula Gießmann:
Digitale Lehre in der Geschichtswissenschaft (Kleine Reihe Hochschuldidaktik), Wochenschau Verlag: Schwalbach/ Ts. 2017.