Database

VieCPro uses the virtual research environment Austrian Prosopographical Information System (APIS) developed at the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The APIS model is based on five entities (persons, places, institutions, events and works) and the relationships between these entities, as well as on a vocabulary for the typification of relationships between entities and full texts and the annotations to these full texts. The Leopold-EXCEL sheets and the MS Access data set correspond structurally to these entities. Thus, there is a basic compatibility of the two database models. In several iterations the APIS web application will be adapted to the needs of VieCPro. The data preparation and the data import will be done by means of tranches based on the “main household” of the emperor and the “partial households” of the empress, the empress dowager and the archdukes and archduchesses.

VieCPro will thus provide a virtual research environment in which users will be able to research thousands of prosopographic profiles of court members and thus a significant proportion of the inhabitants of the city of Vienna from the mid-17th to the 19th century. In VieCPro, users have access to a complete list of offices and their holders as well as for the second half of the 17th century their official salary. These customizable queries are – as far as possible – combined with interactive visualizations, such as a historical city map of Vienna with the places of residence of the court servants, quantifying diagrams on salaries, offices, size of the court states etc., a timeline of the office-holders and their career paths, an organization chart of the court itself, genealogical family trees and networks (fig.). The focus here lies on visualizations that provide added value for the analysis of the data that goes beyond classical statistical evaluations.