Reverse Engineering of the Tabula Imperii Byzantini Balkans

Description

In 1966 Professor Dr Herbert Hunger (1914-2000) announced the founding of the project Tabula Imperii Byzantini (hereafter: TIB) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the 13th International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Oxford, England. Since then, the TIB has been systematically researching the historical geography of the Byzantine Empire from the beginning of the 4th century to the middle of the 15th century. The aim of the project TIB is to publish a historical atlas of the Byzantine provinces and regions from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period. Since the 1960s research has focussed on the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor.

Since 1976 TIB volumes on the Byzantine provinces and regions in the Balkans have been published at regular intervals. In 1976 the volume on “Hellas und Thessalien” (TIB 1) was published, in 1981 on “Nikopolis und Kephallēnia” (TIB 3), in 1991 on “Thrakien (Thrakē, Rodopē und Haimimontos)” (TIB 6), in 1998 on “Aigaion Pelagos (Die nördliche Ägäis)” (TIB 10), in 2008 on “Ostthrakien (Eurōpē)” (TIB 12) and in 2022 on “Makedonien, südlicher Teil” (TIB 11). The aim of the TIB Balkans was and is to reach the Danube border as the Northern border of the Byzantine Empire through the scholarly research of the relevant regions.

In the project “Reverse Engineering of the Tabula Imperii Byzantini Balkans” we are now striving to systematically process the TIB volumes listed above, which have been published in print and are largely analogue (i.e. without digital components), using the reverse engineering method. Therefore, we scan the published volumes using OCR (because only TIB 11 and TIB 12 are available in pdf format), enter the corresponding lemmata (headwords) into the Maps of Power OpenAtlas database and supplement these data sets with scans of black-and-white photographs and slides on the Balkan Peninsula from the TIB archive, which were taken between the 1960s and 2008. These we view and some of which we first have to scan. In this way we are processing analogue, archived data, preserving it for the future and making it accessible to researchers and the public (see Explore below).