The Ebstorf World Map
Lauched at the end of the 1980s, the EbsKart project marked the start of the annotation work on digital images at the Leuphana Univesity, Lüneburg. The final product was a museum information system that is still in use today at the Museum für das Fürstentum Lüneburg and on the Plassenburg in Kulmbach, and which is now accessible in the Internet. Initially created in HyperCard ™ , later converted in HTML, the work was once again revised and extended in 2009 using the functionalities presented by HyperImage.
“The fact that a technology, which has basically put an end to the era of the book as the undisputed dominant medium, can make something legible that was written long before the discovery of printing is not a coincidence. The mass distribution of the book following Gutenberg’s discovery stamped the structure of transcribed speech on discourse, speech that actually took place and which was internalised by quiet reading, clearly linking the written document with the spoken word. Electronic documents – hypertexts – no longer encourage a flow of reading. These cannot be read out loud, a fact true of comic strips, too, which have dangerously been eating away at the book and reading culture (as worried parents have been able to attest to). This is precisely the case with this wonderful image on pergament from the Middle Ages, for which there is not just a single isomorphic speech, but several.”
The Ebskart is a facsimile of an image of the Ebstorf world map on which all text fragments have been transcribed and translated into modern German by Hartmut Kugler, professor of Old German studies.
PD Dr. Martin Warnke
Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Computing in the Cultural
Sciences
D - 21332 Lüneburg
Phone +49 (0) 41 31 / 67 71 202 / Fax +49 (0) 41 31 / 67 71 246
warnke@leuphana.de
Collaboration: Carmen Wedemeyer
