In our sessions so far, we have usually been reviewing parliamentary sources whose primary purpose is to record what was said in Parliaments – verbatim, or nearly verbatim, transcriptions of the millions of words spoken by members of those assemblies. But these sources rarely go back, in any bulk, before the nineteenth century. Before that we are mainly reliant for our knowledge of what happened on the formal records – minutes, statutes or Acta recording the formal decisions of an assembly. This material, sometimes in early printed form, sometimes still in manuscript, presents particular challenges for those doing the work of transferring them to digital form and for those using the records in digital or analogue form. This session of the seminar will bring together two projects currently working on the digitisation of the records of two very different bodies – the sixteenth-century Imperial diet, and the States-General of the Netherlands from 1576 to 1796 – to discuss the particular issues of digitally editing and presenting this material: and will provide a chance to discuss how it can best be exploited by scholars and others.
The Imperial Diet project
Speakers: Gabriele Haug-Moritz and Roman Bleier, University of Graz, and Deutsche Reichstagsakten. Reichsversammlungen 1556–1662 at the Historische Kommission. München
The REPUBLIC project
Speakers: Rik Hoekstra and Marijn Koolen, REPUBLIC, Huygens Instituut, Amsterdam.
Moderator: Paul Seaward, director of The History of Parliament