ER-Research project

DiXiT ER5 Researcher (05/2016-04/2017)

Roman studied History and Religious studies at the University of Graz. He also completed a certificate in Information Modelling in the Humanities at the Centre for Information Modelling (ZIM - ACDH). Following his studies in Graz, he did an internship at the Saint Patrick’s Confessio HyperText Stack (www.confessio.ie), a project of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, and completed a Ph.D. in Digital Arts and Humanities at Trinity College Dublin. After finishing his Ph.D. in 2015, he worked as CENDARI Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and as Researcher at An Foras Feasa, the Digital Humanities Centre at Maynooth University. Roman joined the ZIM-ACDH team in Graz in May 2016.

Roman’s DiXit research focuses on the study of persistent referencing in Digital Editions. The focus is on addressing interactive content in digital editions. He will conduct theoretical study on canonical referencing in the Humanities and the persistent addressing of digital objects. Additionally, Roman will also work on a practical case study and implement his own edition of the manuscript witnesses of St Patrick’s epistles into the GAMS, the digital asset management system  (http://gams.uni-graz.at/).

St Patrick, the famous Irish saint, was a historical person. He was a fifth-century missionary, a bishop and a writer of letters. Two of his epistles survived until today, the Confessio and the Epistola ad milites Corotici. These two texts are preserved in seven medieval manuscript witnesses which were copied centuries after Patrick’s time in different regions of Europe and exhibit substantial differences. The study of the manuscript witnesses is crucial as they are the main sources for the life of the historical Patrick and they give important insights into the beginnings of Christianity in Ireland.

Roman works on a new edition of the texts based on deeply structured electronic transcriptions of each manuscript using the encoding standard of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and following a documentary encoding approach. The edition provides new ways of reading these important documents with a focus on the analysis of the individual versions, their text structure and scribal interventions.