Encoding Crime and Punishment in TEI: The Digital Processing of Early Modern Broadsheets from Vienna

In this project note, we introduce a set of printed single broadsheets in German, recently discovered in two of Vienna’s libraries, which, thanks to their digitization, annotation, and online publication by the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), promise to shed new light on the history of crime and punishment in early modern Vienna. The broadsheets, entitled “Death Sentences,” belong to a little-explored genre of print media distributed to advertise public executions and have not been subject to closer scholarly examination before now. In their investigation of the sources, the ACDH employs a mixed-method approach combining traditional and digital methods. The sources are transcribed and encoded according to the TEI Guidelines, making use, in particular, of the namesdates module to capture essential information about the convicts sentenced to death. The following description gives an overview of the encoding schemes applied and the research possibilities resulting from the use of these methods, and outlines the functionalities of the planned open-access edition. By making the processed and enriched data available to the public, we hope to pave the way for a comprehensive and interdisciplinary analysis of the sources, and to open up an interesting chapter of Viennese history to new audiences.

2. Description of Sources 5 The "Death Sentences" are housed partly in the Vienna City Library and partly in the Austrian National Library, where another collection of documents (encased in one book) has recently been discovered. Another handful of broadsheets are part of the "History and City Life" collection at the Wien Museum. So far, the prints have not been the subject of much systematic scholarly investigation. This can perhaps be explained with reference to the question of scholarly jurisdiction. While the source material in the collection would denitely present a rich eld of study for literary studies, history, and media studies alike, up to now, none of those elds has adopted the topic or paid it any signicant attention. This may partly be due to the fact that an in-depth investigation of the material would require an interdisciplinary approach and a pooling of expertise and competences from various elds. 6 Another reason why the area remains underexplored may be a certain confusion regarding terminology: the "Death Sentences" are variously known as "Armesünderblätter" (sinners' leaets) or "Hinrichtungsugblätter" (execution leaets), and have been counted as examples of "Schafott-Literatur" (gallows literature) or simply of "Flugblätter" (yers). This inconsistency in labeling makes it more dicult to locate and merge the rare references mentioned in secondary sources and impedes scholarly discourse. 3 In one of the few publications on the matter, Ammerer and Adomeit (2010, 273) called for a scholarly edition of the "Death Sentences" which we took as an additional incentive for pursuing our plans for a digital edition that would open up the material to interested scholars from all elds. For this undertaking, our most important objective was the processing and preservation of the texts with the help of an up-to-date inventory of both traditional philological and innovative digital methods.  In order to make the broadsheets publicly available for perusal while also observing the necessary conservation measures and keeping them in good condition, both libraries have produced scans, which are accessible online. 4 While both libraries have tagged their page scans with keywords, there is, as of yet, no full-text version available; hence, the pages can be browsed and searched according to metadata or broad thematic content, but not queried for specic or verbatim content.
The digitally annotated edition developed by the ACDH will remedy this shortcoming. 8 Regarding their physical appearance, the broadsheets have a recognizable format and a somewhat schematic layout. Each print consists of one broadsheet folio folded in the middle, resulting in four pages, of which the rst serves as a well-structured title page and provides essential information about the individual cases and executions. As gure 1 shows, some of the title pages are illustrated with little woodcuts showing skulls adorned with common baroque vanitas symbols, such as fading candles, winding snakes, wilting owers, or hourglasses. 9 All of the broadsheets in our corpus follow a relatively consistent structure starting with the heading "Todesurteil," preceded by the German adjective "wohlverdient." This attribute, which literally means "well-deserved," declares the sentence just or fair and the punishment appropriate to the person's crime. Each broadsheet provides the readers with the convict's personal datacovering, most commonly, their age, place of birth, marital status, religion, and profession. They further give biographical accounts about the life and crime of each "malefactor" followed by descriptions of the sentence and the punishment imposed. In addition to that, the prints can also include genre-specic text forms such as moral speeches, farewell songs, and ballads, furnishing valuable information about the lives and deaths of eighteenth-century criminals in Vienna.

10
The intention behind these anonymous broadsheets is rather unclear: It has been speculated (Czeike 2004, 234) that they were sold on the day of executions to provide people with background information on the public spectacle. However, the specic blend of factual information and moral didacticism found in this genre suggests a more complex picture. We can assume that the broadsheets have functions that go beyond the mere distribution of information. They may have served as advertisements or even as souvenirs for the execution events. While they can be seen as early modern precursors of the news media, their darkly fascinating subject matter may also have had a certain sensationalist entertainment value comparable to that of the yellow press news that people read with a sense of thrill and titillation. In addition to that, we can assume that the broadsheets also served a political purpose and were printed and distributed with the consent and acquiescence of the authorities in order to reinforce the legitimacy of legal verdicts.

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Having reviewed all the various manifestations of this occasion-related and commercially exploited genre, we can see that the "Death Sentences" are a multifaceted format with multiple purposes. Their functions range from providing information about particular criminals and their punishment to advertising the executions as public events, establishing the legitimacy of these disciplinary actions, and nally setting the cases up as moral examples with a deterrent function.

Encoding Crime and Punishment in TEI 12
After collecting and compiling the corpus of 180 broadsheets, all primary sources were digitized and carefully transcribed by junior researchers, students, and volunteers and proofread by the core team. As Optical Character Recognition software is well known to be problematic and can perform poorly, especially with historical documents, we decided to manually key in each text in Microsoft Word, following the editing guidelines developed for the Austrian Baroque Corpus. 5 After manual transcription and double-checking, the nal versions of transcripts provide an accurate representation of the original texts and an optimal basis for further markup. Converted to XML, the transcripts were manually annotated following a project-specic customization of TEI P5 (TEI Consortium 2019) which enforces our data model for the descriptions of oenses and provides controlled vocabularies for the values and relevant metadata categories (described in section 4).

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In the annotation, considerable attention was paid to the structural and semantic features of the texts. Given the limited physical extent of the broadsheets, they show peculiarities that deviate from the TEI Guidelines' document model assumptions in certain details. For example, although all broadsheets have a rather formulaic title section, in about ten percent of the texts it does not completely ll the rst page but is directly followed by the main text on the same page. While for this reason the title sections could qualify as simple headings, we found over 60 examples where such a section also contains an imprint, featuring a publishing date or a printer's name. In order to avoid losing the semantics of <docImprint> in such cases and still be able to keep our encoding consistent, we decided to encode all of them as <titlePage> elements, adding a @type attribute with the value "heading" to those which do not cover the full rst page of a broadsheet. 6 Given the Guidelines' rather explicit wording ("contains the title page of a text") which seems to discourage this use, we initially considered generalizing the element's name and description in our ODD to <titleBlock>, thus decoupling the structural function from its physical appearance. In the end, however, we decided against this, mainly to ensure interoperability of our project's data. Printers' licenses provide another example of text that poses challenges to the application of the current Guidelines, in the very rare cases when they appear not on the title page but on the back page of a broadsheet, right before the <docImprint>. For those cases, one possible option would have been to add <imprimatur> to the model.pLike.front class. Again, for reasons of interoperability, we have decided to use a workaround, encoding these as <ab type="imprimatur">. Although this means that we cannot encode the printer's license inside a <titlePage> element, this seems like a viable trade-o between semantic accuracy and data reusability.
14 The remaining textual structure of the broadsheets is rather simple but exhibits some characteristic changes over time. While most broadsheets are made up of running text paragraphs, 25 of them (mostly from the 1730s and '40s) also contain verse structured in stanzas which are encoded as <lg> elements. One can observe that from the 1750s onwards, the texts' content structure is expressed in a more explicit manner: recurring sections with formulaic headings like "Jnhalt ihres Urtheils." describe the verdicts decided on the oenders. For easier analysis, we have decided to add appropriate @type attributes to such divisions. Additionally, we captured the physical structure of the broadsheets (line and page breaks) as well as some basic renditional features. In the case of the 31 broadsheets that are on hand in more than one version, we encoded the various versions following the parallel segmentation method provided by the textcrit module. 7

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Substantial eorts went into modeling and encoding information on the oenders and their crimes by means of the namesdates module 8 in order to derive computable data. On the one hand, we encoded personal attributes, such as an oender's name, 9 sex, 10 place of birth, age at the time of execution, civil status, religious faith, and occupation. Given that such factual information is always contained in the <titlePage> of each broadsheet, we abstained from tagging the exact locations in the text, but decided to keep only structured data in a <particDesc> element in the header. We decided to normalize biographical information wherever this seemed useful within the scope of the project (age, sex, civil state, faith). However, we decided to keep the original wording for aspects which we did not nd suitable for quantication. For example, we found too little information regarding the occupations of oenders to allow for relevant comparative analysis across all 180 broadsheets. In such cases, we used the verbatim descriptions from the text, since further classication into a scheme for early modern professions was far beyond the scope of our project.

A Typology of Crimes 20
Of the questions that can be investigated through the digitally processed broadsheets, the concepts behind oenses and punishments are among the most interesting ones. In early modern times, oenses and their punishment were generally dened by laws at dierent levels. During the more than 100 years covered by our collection of historic broadsheets, dierent laws and penal codes were in force at dierent times. Among them, there were, for example, the Constitutio Criminalis 14 25 The comparison of the execution broadsheets, the confraternity records, and the newspapers also reveals how accounts of the same execution could dier considerably from each other, how the information circulated between the three dierent formats, and how it was adapted to dierent purposes.

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As the example below shows, newspaper articles (just like the "Death Sentences" broadsheets themselves) usually give a more elaborate account than the confraternity records. Concerning the execution of the thirty-year-old Barbara Huberin, the newspaper article on her sentencing provides very detailed information about the woman's oenses and notes that the executioner from Preßburg was unlucky since her beheading required two blows. In contrast, the very brief entry found in the confraternity records gives only the date of the execution and three prosaic lines. The comparison below between the text of a "Death Sentence" and a newspaper article shows only some slight changes to the original wording: in order to shorten the text, the article replaced spelled-out numbers with (Arabic) numerals. Tracking the dierences between the two example texts reveals mostly spelling variations. Apart from the adaptation of the introductory formula to t the new context, no signicant changes can be observed. The only substantial lexical change was made to the Latin word condemniret, which was translated into the German word verurtheilet (sentenced). The comparison suggests that during certain decades the newspaper publishers tended to simply copy the existing text of the "Death Sentences." Comparing the sources ("Death Sentences," articles in the newspaper, and confraternity records), it becomes obvious that none of them provides a complete list of all public executions. This is not surprising. First, it is rather unlikely that all "Death Sentences" were preserved and included in the collections available to us. Second, gaps in the newspaper coverage can easily be explained through editorial decisions to report only on some of the more spectacular executions. Third, the confraternity may not have gotten permission to take care of the funeral for each executed person, resulting in the absence of some of the cases from their records. For this reason, we will probably never be able to tell for sure how many executions were actually carried out in eighteenth-century Vienna. The analysis and the comparison have to focus on the representation of the situation as reected in those records and media that are available to us.
Thanks to the digital availability of the "Death Sentences," it will also be possible to compare data from Vienna with data from other European capital cities from the same period, a prospect that seems particularly promising in view of the range of international projects dealing with crime and punishment, such as the above-mentioned Old Bailey Proceedings Online project in the UK or a group of scholars in the Netherlands who are exploring the relations between crime and gender. 15 With this in mind, the use of international encoding standards like the TEI is essential in order for this collection to become a comparable dataset for bigger projects.

Opening Up the Sources 30
By creating a set of enriched data on the history of penal practices in early modern Vienna, the project team contributes to enhancing knowledge of this little-explored area and lays the groundwork for further research. In order to guarantee that the processed material will be reusable for dierent purposes, the 180 enriched "Death Sentences" will be made accessible online. The project team will publish the edited basic texts of the rare broadsheets as an open access edition which will include not only the attached facsimiles but also reliable full-text transcriptions, made available in an integrated online environment. Thus, user groups will have options to access, read, and query the broadsheets easily within the web application while also being able to download the XML les for further processing. Besides the common full-text query options, the interface will oer dierent navigational menus that invite user interaction and allow exible search strategies (e.g., of keywords and of biographical parameters such as age and sex). Hence, the applied markup not only can be used by the team who carried out the annotation but is also open to other researchers who may wish to take the historical data as a starting point for further inquiry.

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Although we consider the project's primary relevance to lie in its service of providing new source material to research communities within disciplines such as literary studies, linguistics, and historical studies (especially crime history and social history), as well as theology and legal studies, we hope that the publication of the digital collection can also be of interest to users outside academia.
Thanks to the open access format, the web application could be used as an educational tool and may help to open up the fascinating history of early modern everyday life to entirely new audiences.
The histories that can be glimpsed and made tangible through the "Death Sentences" with their vivid stories of the life and death of eighteenth-century Viennese "malefactors" are not only accessible to the scientic community but could also capture the interest of a lay audience.