ACDH Lecture 12.1 Julia Hintersteiner (PLUS Salzburg): From Punch Cards to Prompt Engineering

Описание: The MHDBDB and the Future of Semantic Annotation with LLMs

The Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (MHDBDB) has supported generations of scholars working with medieval German texts. After decades of development through relational databases and, more recently, RDF-based graph architectures, the MHDBDB has undergone a complete technological redesign – now centering on a TEI-first model that directly supports LLM-based research workflows.

This talk presents the rationale and lessons learned behind this shift: the increasing importance of structured, AI-readable data; the technical and infrastructural limitations of high-complexity standoff models; and the sobering reality that managing billions of RDF triples requires levels of personnel and funding rarely available to humanities projects. In this context, AI – particularly Large Language Models – emerges not only as a supplementary tool, but as a game changer. With LLMs now playing a growing role in annotation, search, and interpretation, classical TEI-XML has proven to be the ideal environment for Expert-in-the-Loop workflows: it enables transparent, semantically rich, and interoperable data structures that are both human-legible and machine-actionable – bridging philological precision and AI scalability.

Literature:
Alan van Beek. 2025. Von historischen Daten zu KI – Bericht zum interdisziplinären Workshop. Digital Humanities an der Universität Salzburg. DOI: https://doi.org/10.58079/155ob . Darin verlinkt: Foliensatz und Aufzeichnung des Vortrags von Christopher Pollin und Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer (hinterer Teil zur technischen Neuausrichtung der MHDBDB).

Alan van Beek und Julia Hintersteiner. 2025. “Poc, the Black Knight” – Wie voreingenommen sind LLMs bei mittelalterlicher Literatur? Digital Humanities an der Universität Salzburg. DOI: https://doi.org/10.58079/153my

Julia Hintersteiner, Michael Göggelmann, Alan van Beek, Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer. 2024. Von der Datenpflege zur Schnittstellenentwicklung: Eine Evaluation des Datenkolosses MHDBDB. Digital Humanities an der Universität Salzburg. DOI: https://doi.org/10.58079/12p9n

Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer. 2022. “50 Jahre Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (MHDBDB). Eine Jubiläums-Zeitreise zwischen Lochkarten, Pixel-Drachen, Relationaler Datenbank und Graphdaten.” In: Beiträge zur mediävistischen Erzählforschung, Digitale Mediävistik. Perspektiven der Digital Humanities für die Altgermanistik, no. Themenheft 12 (2022): 161–186. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25619/BmE20223203 .

This lecture is presented in close collaboration with the University of Vienna (https://dh.univie.ac.at/) within the framework of the Digital Humanities Lecture Circuit and was recorded on January 20th, 2026 at the University of Vienna.

Learn more about the ACDH-CH Lecture Series at: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/acdh/newsevent...