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Ediarum is an editing environment designed and implemented by TELOTA at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW, Germany). It is based on two main components: an open-source XML native database (eXistDB) and a widely used commercial XML editor (Oxygen XML editor).
The aim of ediarum is to facilitate the task of encoding texts in TEI format, to store the resulting XML files in eXistDB and to enable collaboration and sharing amongst the members of a team. The central framework of this environment --known as ediarum.BASE.edit-- allows the editor to hide the XML tags and use a number of functions through a toolbar and a menu. In other words, the ediarum.BASE.edit's interface increases the usability of the XML editor and speeds up the encoding process and can be adapted to each project's needs. However, this framework is only available in German language. In other words, the code and the language interface are only accessible for and usable by German-speaking users.
While the original goal of TELOTA was to “bridge the gap” between the markup and the editor (Dumont and Fechner, 2015), the interface language creates a barrier for encoders who do not work in German and impedes potential collaborations with other institutions. In order to break this usability and accessibility barrier, in 2020 Proyecto Humboldt Digital (ProHD), a cooperation project between the BBAW and the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana (Cuba), engaged with an adaptation process involving the internationalization of the software (developing features and code that are independent of language or locale) and the localization in the Spanish locale (creating resource files containing translations). As a result of this process, the project has developed a localization of ediarum.BASE.edit called ediarum.PROHD.edit that can be downloaded on Github.
This paper aims to present ediarum.PROHD.edit and to reflect on the most important challenges encountered during the software localization. After reviewing what “localization” means in Translation Studies (Pym, 2016; Jiménez Crespo, 2016), I will discuss the process of internationalization of the software (mostly variables written in ediarum's default functions), the localization itself (the translation of terms and descriptions displayed in the interface) and some testing undertaken with the Cuban team of Proyecto Humboldt Digital.
Der theologische Rationalismus war die letzte Gestalt der Aufklärungstheologie; seine Blütezeit erlebte er gleichzeitig und in Konkurrenz mit der u.a. von Schelling geprägten spekulativen Richtung und mit der teils mehr biblizistischen, teils mehr konfessionellen Theologie der Erweckung. Kennzeichen des Rationalismus war einerseits eine verstärkte historisch-kritische Quellenforschung, andererseits das Bemühen, Lehre und Praxis soweit möglich auf das auszurichten, was jenseits geschichtlicher Autoritäten der allgemeinen menschlichen Vernunft plausibel sei: die Existenz Gottes, die Unsterblichkeit der Seele und die Pflicht zu tugendhaftem Leben. Seit etwa 1840 verfiel der Rationalismus.
Untersucht wird die Rolle der Psalmen im christlichen Gottesdienst, wie sie in der spätantiken christlichen Exegese deutlich wird.
Single-cell analyses comprise a multitude of analytical methods that share a common feature, namely the focus on individual cells. This is in contrast to previous methods that provided summarized data for cell clusters, groups of cells, tissues and organs. The new field offers huge potential not only for basic research, but also for medical and biotechnological applications, as it opens up new levels in the context-related and personal interpretation of biological interconnections. This brochure on single-cell analysis provides an overview on the new possibilities from the viewpoint of developmental biology, biomedicine and bioinformatics, but also addresses possible social im-plications and consequences.
When thinking about the historic landscape gardens of the Berlin-Brandenburg region we tend to focus automatically on the royal gardens that Peter Joseph Lenné originally included in his beautification plan for the Potsdam area that are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There is good reason for this focus. The complex of Sanssouci, Charlottenhof, Neuer Garten, Babelsberg, Glienicke, and Pfaueninsel constitutes an extraordinarily beautiful panorama. But from a broader perspective the unique character of these gardens can be seen to have informed the garden landscape of all of Berlin in a series of social transformations that occurred during the course of industrialisation in the nineteenth century. For this purpose it is useful to focus on the role of steam power. By no means, however, did the significance of steam power (or the lack of it) end with its utilitarian function, for it informed the aesthetic character of landscape gardens, too. And this character changed with the historical transformations that associated different sorts of gardens with people in different social strata. I will schematise three such »classes« of people and gardens.
Dealing with the Consequences of Climate Change in Historic Parks and Gardens in the United Kingdom
(2019)
Given that long term climate change is recognised as having an ›impact upon all aspects of daily life, not least the survival of heritage assets‹ there is a need to consider all aspects of heritage in the United Kingdom (UK). In order to provide an international context for the German situation this paper looks specifically at adaptation measures that have developed within the main British conservation and horticultural organisations, Historic England, the National Trust and the Royal Horticultural Society. It does this by providing some cultural context for the present policies. It then looks at how the climate is expected to change by the end of this century. It identifies the main challenges, and then reviews the responses by way of adaptation and mitigation.
Historic parks and gardens survive in many places with some sites still in use but others abandoned long ago and now given over to other purposes. Accurate repair and reliable reconstruction depend upon archaeological information which is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The impairment and loss of such detail threaten historical integrity. This means that we must monitor changes and develop suitable mitigation.
This paper presents the Bogoroditsk (Tula Region in Russia) Park’s history of origin in the 18th century, its subsequent functioning and degrading. Special attention is paid to the contribution of A. T. Bolotov serving as the supervisor of Bogoroditsk Volost in the 1770s–1790s. In conclusion, the contemporary state of Bogoroditsk Park and its water-supply facilities that is worrying the experts is described.
The creation of a representation official park of nationwide scale and importance is hedged about with a lot of difficulties. It is supposed to be a paragon of beauty and utility while also being an epoch’s monument remaining in place for long decades or centuries. The paper analyses the balance between the beauty and sustainability in the conception and the actual life of eight parks in the realm of Russian culture (Russian Empire, Soviet Union, Russian Federation). That said, one of them (House of Bezborodko) represents an unconsummated project, but one that is typical of its epoch.
Introduction
(2019)
Für Schleiermacher ist Religion keine pädagogisch nützliche Mischung von Metaphysik und Moral, sondern eine eigene Dimension des Menschseins, Anschauung des Universums, Sinn und Geschmack fürs Unendliche; die von der Aufklärung favorisierte „natürliche Religion“ der allgemeinen, übergeschichtlichen Vernunftwahrheiten sei bloß eine Totgeburt, jede wirkliche, lebendige Religion dagegen eine unableitbare geschichtliche Individualität. Im Christentum sei Jesus Christus die Zentralgestalt, der Vermittler und Versöhner des Zwiespalts zwischen Endlichem und Unendlichem, an dem sich alle Religion abarbeite. Im Laufe seiner Entwicklung strebe das Christentum immer mehr zu Sozialgestalten ohne Hierarchie zwischen Priestern und Laien; in der Vollendung (den aber selbst der Protestantismus noch nicht erreicht habe) würden alle „von Gott gelehrt“ sein (Johannes 6,45).
The computer has come to play a transformative role in the ways we model, store, process and study text. Nevertheless, we cannot yet claim to have realised the promises of the digital medium: the organisation and dissemination of scholarly knowledge through the exchange, reuse and enrichment of data sets. Despite the acclaimed interdisciplinary nature of digital humanities, current digital research takes place in a closed environment and rarely surpasses the traditional boundaries of a field. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to continue questioning the models we use and whether they are actually suitable for our scholarly needs. There’s a risk that the affordances and limitations of a prevailing model may blind us to aspects it doesn’t support.
In her talk, Elli Bleeker discusses different technologies to model data with respect to their expressive power and their potential to address the needs of the scholarly community. Within this framework, she introduces a new data model for text, Text-As-Graph (TAG), and it’s reference implementation Alexandria, a text repository system. The TAG model allows researchers to store, query, and analyse text that is encoded from different perspectives. Alexandria thus stimulates new ways of looking at textual objects, facilitates the exchange of information across disciplines, and secures textual knowledge for future endeavours. From a philosophical perspective, the TAG model and the workflow of Alexandria raise compelling questions about our notions of textuality, and prompt us to reconsider how we can best model the variety of textual dimensions.
When managing large quantities of data, it is a common solution to utilize a centralized data management software to forge a connection between metadata and the data objects themselves. In case of text-based objects without any attached metadata, it is easy for humans to contextualize these objects by recognizing patterns such as filenames, titles, authors etc. This task becomes a challenge when dealing with non-text-based objects like images in the cultural heritage domain. Without metadata or expert knowledge, it becomes difficult to estimate the creation date of a painting or tell the name of its painter. Thus, the ability to contextualize data depends on whether there is a working connection between the metadata store and the data object itself. This connection fails as soon as the file is moved on the file system without having these changes also applied in the corresponding
data base, or when the file is shared without a reference to its original location. This paper presents an approach to overcome that type of co-dependency by utilizing XMP to embed cultural heritage metadata directly into image files to ensure their location-independent long-term preservation. The “Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi” Germany (CVMA) project serves as an example use-case.
quoteSalute strives to make data of digital scholarly editions of letters (DSELs) accessible in a playful fashion by enabling users to integrate salutations from DSELs in their own email correspondence. The foundation of quoteSalute is a curated TEI-XML text corpus which has been created by extracting <salute>-tags from TEI-XML-encoded DSELs. For providing users with fitting salutations, we annotated the data regarding language, level of politeness and intended gender of sender and receiver.
Berlin Text System 3.1 User Manual : Editorial Software of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae Project
(2018)
The Berlin Text System (BTS) Version 3.1 manual introduces a Java-based software designed for editing and annotating Ancient Egyptian texts. BTS integrates a CouchDB database and an Elastic search engine to support its main components: Text Editor, Lemma List, Thesaurus, and Abstract Text.
The Text Editor facilitates transliteration, translation, lemmatization, and annotations, allowing for detailed lexical and grammatical analysis. Hieroglyphic transcriptions can be entered via a specialized Hieroglyph Type Writer based on JSesh.
The Lemma List ist ready to contain pre-Coptic lemmata, divided into Hieroglyphic/Hieratic and Demotic scripts, providing comprehensive entries with passport data, transliterations, and translations.
The Thesaurus allows for metadata enrichment of texts with controlled vocabulary for consistent data management, supporting contextual analysis through structured metadata.
The manual covers BTS's user interface, including menu bar, toolbar, status bar, and workspace, divided into views for each main component. Features like Revision History for tracking and restoring versions, indexing, and search capabilities enhance user efficiency. BTS is a powerful tool for the study and preservation of Ancient Egyptian texts, integrating advanced database and search technologies with specialized textual analysis tools.
New, precise genetic engineering methods for genome alteration in living cells, which can be classed together under the generic heading “genome surgery”,are currently sparking a revolution in biomedical research. The Interdisciplinary Research Group Gene Technology Report is, in principle, in favour of research on these promising new methods for the medical sector. However, for the time being, it has clearly spoken out against gene surgery experiments on the human germ line, which could also enter the realm of possibility thanks to these methods.The research group, therefore, supports the call, which has already been discussed at length in scientific and public circles, for a moratorium for germ line experiments. The period of the moratorium should be used to debate the experimental,
ethical and legal aspects of germ line therapy in an open, transparent
and critical manner with a view to more clearly defining the opportunities and
risks of these technologies for man and nature, and to elaborating recommendations for future regulations. The goal of this analysis is to promote a discourse of this kind.
Current financial and monetary difficulties in Europe are overshadowing the issue of a lack of common European identity. 200 years of nation states seem to have suppressed 1800 years of a history shaped by mutual enrichment in politics, science and the arts – a European cultural heritage. It is for the humanities and social sciences (SSH) to research, document and preserve this heritage, where the European science academies play a major role. However, a pan-European research programme on European cultural heritage and identity is still lacking, and, in comparison to the rest of the European SSH research landscape, the science academies are terra incognita. This book provides an analytical report of the first survey of basic research in the SSH conducted by the European scientific academies and related research organisations. It not only provides greatly needed information about this important area of the European research landscape, but also investigates the potential for a pan-European academies’ research programme in the SSH (including a corresponding digital infrastructure) that could strengthen the integration of European research into cultural heritage and identity. The main topic of this publication is the working practices of the projects surveyed with a focus on: o the science academies of Europe o research fields and topics o running times and funding o staff and early-stage researchers o research sites and access to research material o digital research practices o publication, dissemination and visibility o international collaboration o project evaluation
In 20 articles experts from research, politics and research management discuss current challenges and future advancements of European research infrastructures for the humanities and social sciences, particularly in view of the funding scheme Horizon 2020 and the ESRFI Roadmap update. Starting with an overview of SSH infrastructures it elaborates on four specific areas that increasingly demand a pan-European approach. Drawing from the SSH infrastructure projects´ experience, it then (re-) defines the requirements and potential for next generation infrastructure projects. They highlight the developments and problems they anticipate, focussing in particular on advancing digitalisation in the SSH. The book draws together the insights gained at a conference of the same name, “Facing the Future”, held in Berlin in November 2013. The conference was attended by 70 experts from 19 European countries who met to discuss the new challenges posed by the increasing necessity of integrating digital research tools into everyday working life. It was organised by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), the federation of All European Academies (ALLEA), the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, and the German Data Forum. It took place as part of a project financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) entitled Survey and Analysis of Basic Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities in Europe (SASSH).
The African European Mediterranean Academies for Science Education (AEMASE) initiative is committed to promoting science outreach to society and to improving the quality and accessibility of science education in schools throughout the eponymous North-South region. To achieve these aims, one of AEMASE’s key activities is implementing IBSE in more schools and supporting the continued professional development of science educators in IBSE methodology and practice. In the long term, the AEMASE partner institutions, which come from all three geographical areas, seek to contribute to the steady development of quality science and innovation systems by focussing on stimulating and supporting the future generations of researchers and innovators. In this context, key AEMASE partner institutions held an international conference on science education in Rome in May 2014, hosted by the venerable Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Participants from six continents shared their professional experiences with IBSE and discussed best practices, challenges and future collaboration opportunities. The conference brought together representatives from three crucial areas of expertise: science, education, and policy. The outcomes of this conference are condensed in the report which serves as a testament to the relevance and importance of quality science education for modern societies.
For a fistful of blogs: Discovery and comparative benchmarking of republishable German content
(2014)
We introduce two corpora gathered on the web and related to computer-mediated communication: blog posts and blog comments. In order to build such corpora, we addressed following issues: website discovery and crawling, content extraction constraints, and text quality assessment. The blogs were manually classified as to their license and content type. Our results show that it is possible to find blogs in German under Creative Commons license, and that it is possible to perform text extraction and linguistic annotation efficiently enough to allow for a comparison with more traditional text types such as newspaper corpora and subtitles. The comparison gives insights on distributional properties of the processed web texts on token and type level. For example, quantitative analysis reveals that blog posts are close to written language, while comments are slightly closer to spoken language.
From exclusion to inclusion : improving clinical research in vulnerable populations ; memorandum
(2014)
Therapeutic care for vulnerable populations – meaning patient groups such as underage children and the mentally ill that have limited or no capacity for giving informed consent – is severely lacking. Thus, for example, a great portion of pharmaceuticals used in the treatment of children and youth have not been specifically designed for these groups, which often results in side effects that are disproportionate to those associated with such medicines when used by adults. Moreover, vulnerable populations are at times faced with having no therapies at all for some of their ailments, such that children and dementia sufferers, for example, are often considered to be “therapeutic orphans”. It is therefore urgent that clinical research be carried out among vulnerable populations in order to improve their therapeutic possibilities. The Clinical Research on Vulnerable Populations Research Group – a cooperative effort between the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Berlin, Germany) and the European Academy of Technology Assessment (Bad Neuenahr, Germany) – has set itself the task of analyzing the state of clinical research on vulnerable populations so as to be able to develop suggestions for improving future research of this kind. The results of this work are presented in the following memorandum, which seeks to portray the state-of-the-art in this domain while also assessing the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary ethical and medical perspectives related to it. The memorandum is primarily oriented towards those in the relevant scientific disciplines who can benefit from obtaining an informed consensus regarding the current state of the discussions taking place around this topic.
The current debates on the demographic transformation have been characterised on the one hand by declining birth rates and on the other by increasing life expectancy. Such debates usually focus on the consequences for society, which are frequently described in dark terms. In this booklet, by contrast, you will find analyses and suggestions on how to improve the situation of children and parents to make it easier to realise the desire to have children.
Among mass digitization methods, double-keying is considered to be the one with the lowest error rate. This method requires two independent transcriptions of a text by two different operators. It is particularly well suited to historical texts, which often exhibit deficiencies like poor master copies or other difficulties such as spelling variation or complex text structures. Providers of data entry services using the double-keying method generally advertise very high accuracy rates (around 99.95% to 99.98%). These advertised percentages are generally estimated on the basis of small samples, and little if anything is said about either the actual amount of text or the text genres which have been proofread, about error types, proofreaders, etc. In order to obtain significant data on this problem it is necessary to analyze a large amount of text representing a balanced sample of different text types, to distinguish the structural XML/TEI level from the typographical level, and to differentiate between various types of errors which may originate from different sources and may not be equally severe. This paper presents an extensive and complex approach to the analysis and correction of double-keying errors which has been applied by the DFG-funded project “Deutsches Textarchiv” (German Text Archive, hereafter DTA) in order to evaluate and preferably to increase the transcription and annotation accuracy of double-keyed DTA texts. Statistical analyses of the results gained from proofreading a large quantity of text are presented, which verify the common accuracy rates for the double-keying method.
Numerous studies underline the importance of immaterial benefits provided by ecosystems and especially by cultural landscapes, which are shaped by intimate human–nature interactions. However, due to methodological challenges, cultural ecosystem services are rarely fully considered in ecosystem services assessments. This study performs a spatially explicit participatory mapping of the complete range of cultural ecosystem services and several disservices perceived by people living in a cultural landscape in Eastern Germany. The results stem from a combination of mapping exercises and structured interviews with 93 persons that were analyzed with statistical and GIS-based techniques. The results show that respondents relate diverse cultural services and multiple local-level sites to their individual well-being. Most importantly, aesthetic values, social relations and educational values were reported. Underlining the holistic nature of cultural ecosystem services, the results reveal bundles of services as well as particular patterns in the perception of these bundles for respondent groups with different socio-demographic backgrounds. Cultural services are not scattered randomly across a landscape, but rather follow specific patterns in terms of the intensity, richness and diversity of their provision. Resulting hotspots and coldspots of ecosystem services provision are related to landscape features and land cover forms. We conclude that, despite remaining methodological challenges, cultural services mapping assessments should be pushed ahead as indispensable elements in the management and protection of cultural landscapes. Spatially explicit information on cultural ecosystem services that incorporates the differentiated perceptions of local populations provides a rich basis for the development of sustainable land management strategies. These could realign the agendas of biodiversity conservation and cultural heritage preservation, thereby fostering multifunctionality.
This paper is an updated presentation of the Ramses project being currently developed at the University of Liège. The first section stresses the main objectives and gives a technical description of the general architecture of Ramses software. The second part describes the encoding procedures and reviews the current state of the annotation. In the third section, some changes brought about by the use of large-scale corpora are discussed from an epistemological viewpoint. The paper ends with the presentation of some new avenues for research that will ensue from the use of a complex multilevel corpus.
Even a reductionist attempt to define scholarship is clearly fraught with difficulty, but an idealised historical lexicographer-cum-scholar must obviously have – inter alia and at the very least – a profound linguistic and textual knowledge of the language being documented, an ability to understand texts in their historical context and to analyse the meaning or function of lexical items as used in context, an ability to synthesise the results through generalisation and abstraction and to formulate them in a way that is both accurate, i.e. reflects actual usage, and user- or reader-friendly, i.e. is comprehensible to the user/reader. S/he must have encyclopedic or world knowledge and literary skills in order to understand general content words and explain their meaning and their semantic shifts perhaps over many centuries, and technical expertise to understand specialist terms and define their use in specific contexts, again perhaps over time. In respect of etymology s/he must not only have knowledge of older stages of the language and an ability to reconstruct unattested forms, but also knowledge of the other languages that have impacted on the language being documented, or at least familiarity with the scholarly historical dictionaries of those languages. That is a tall order indeed, impossibly tall for any one person today given today‘s demands on and expectations of lexicographers. Teams which include specialists in different areas or at least have access to consultants in such areas alongside generalists are needed if scholarly standards are to be met. The standard of scholarship is primarily a factor of the number and range as well as the knowledge and experience of the lexicographers, as is in large measure the pace of production. In this regard, it cannot be emphasised enough that scholarly historical lexicography of high quality is and will remain very time consuming.
The article summarizes the contents and the structurtal premises of the “Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien” (TITUS), focussing on search functions and facilities and questions of the encoding of ancient languages written in various scripts. Examples are taken from Tocharian, Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, and other ancient Indo-European languages covered by TITUS.
Virtually all conventional text-based natural language processing techniques - from traditional information retrieval systems to full-fledged parsers - require reference to a fixed lexicon accessed by surface form, typically trained from or constructed for synchronic input text adhering strictly to contemporary orthographic conventions. Unconventional input such as historical text which violates these conventions therefore presents difficulties for any such system due to lexical variants present in the input but missing from the application lexicon. To facilitate the extension of synchronically-oriented natural language processing techniques to historical text while minimizing the need for specialized lexical resources, one may first attempt an automatic canonicalization of the input text. This paper provides an informal overview of the various canonicalization techniques currently employed by the Deutsches Textarchiv project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities to prepare a corpus of historical German text for part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, and integration into a robust online information retrieval system.
Over millennia human well-being has benefited from ecosystems, not only through tangible goods, but also through intangible assets known as cultural ecosystem services. Despite growing research over the last decade, cultural services assessment still remains arbitrary and is largely limited to marketable services such as tourism. Evident difficulties in standardizing definitions and measurements have challenged cultural services accounting in decision making processes. However, the imminent formation of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services offers an opportunity to counterbalance this misrepresentation by establishing a scientific basis for consistently assessing cultural services. In that regard, the current review intends to facilitate discussion investigating the current state of cultural services accounting by offering an appraisal of existing evidence regarding cultural services indicator quality. The current review builds on scientifically recognized frameworks to develop a holistic understanding of how cultural services indicators are conceived within ecosystem services research. Among the measures found, benefit indicators were most frequently used for assessing inspirational, educational and recreational services. A broad variety of methods for accounting cultural services was found, mainly due to the varied aims of the studies. Most of the cultural services indicators were deficient concerning their clarity of definitions, purposes and understanding of the processes to be measured and referring only marginally to tradeoffs and bundles with other services. Only 17% performed multitemporal assessments and 23% used spatially explicit information. It seems that cultural services indicators quality could be greatly enhanced by investing more effort towards involving relevant stakeholders in conceptualization and communication phases, using participatory mapping tools to enhance visibility.
Numerous high-quality primary text sources—in the context of the curation project described here, this means full-text transcriptions (and corresponding image scans) of German works originating from the 15th to the 19th centuries—are scattered among the web or stored remotely. E.g., transcriptions of historical sources are stored locally on degrading recording media and cannot be found, let alone accessed by third parties. Additionally, idiosyncratic, project-specific markup conventions and uncommon, out-of-date or inflexible storage formats often hinder further usage and analysis of the data. Often, textual resources are accompanied by scarce, insufficient or inaccurate bibliographic information, which is only one further reason why valuable resources, even if available on the web, remain undiscovered by and are of little use to the wider research community. The integration of these dispersed primary text sources into the sustainable, web and centres-based research infrastructure of CLARIN-D will be an important step to solve this problem. The Full Paper illustrates an exemplary approach taken by the »Deutsches Textarchiv« (DTA; www.deutschestextarchiv.de) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) to integrate dispersed textual resources and corresponding image scans from various sources into a large historical text corpus of its own and to insert these into the infrastructure of CLARIN-D.
The FEW is a huge dictionary when we consider the sheer mass of data (25 volumes, 16000 pages) and its exhaustive aims. It has indeed the purpose of registering and etymologizing the whole lexicon, not only of French, but also of earlier stages of the language and of Occitan; of every Gallo-romance dialect; of every technical or professional genre; of every language register, including slang. Summing up, the FEW aims to include and describe every single lexical unit which exists or has existed in the territory of ancient Gaul. The sheer size of this undertaking means two things, which directly influence the digitalisation of the dictionary: Firstly, there is a a huge amount of data; secondly, the presentation and organization of the data is exceedingly complex. The reasons for digitalising the FEW are the easy searches for units, and the carrying out of searches using criteria that are not possible to use with the printed version. However, the fulfillment of these purposes includes some risks, and potentially the cutting of some corners, especially the temptation of renouncing reading.
Most industrial countries have experienced a transformation of land use: from decreasing to expanding forest areas, the so-called forest transition. Outside closed forests, European rural landscapes exhibit a diversity of tree-based agricultural systems, but the question of whether this forest transition has also affected ‘trees outside forests’ has rarely been studied. The aim of this study is to analyze the spatial-temporal dynamics of farm trees and woodlands in an agricultural landscape in Eastern Germany from 1964 to 2008, based on aerial photographs and digital orthophotos. Taking a landscape ecological perspective, we quantify farm tree dynamics, disentangle processes of gain and loss in the socialist and post-socialist periods of Eastern Germany, and assess differences in ecosystem services provided by farm trees. A substantial increase of overall tree cover by 24.8% was observed for the selected time period, but trajectories have been disparate across different farm tree classes. The increase in tree cover was stronger in steep valleys than on hills and plateaus, indicating a significant interdependence between topography and trajectories of change. Patch numbers of farm trees did not increase, which suggests that the expansion of tree cover is mostly due to a spatial expansion of previously existing tree patches. Overall net gains in tree cover were rather similar during the socialist and post-socialist eras. The general increase in tree cover was accompanied by increases in agriculture-related ecosystem service provision, but the increase in pollination and pest control services was much lower than that in water purification services. These findings present the first empirical evidence from an industrialized country that there is also an ongoing ‘forest transition’ outside closed forests. Potential, partially counteracting drivers of change during the socialist and post-socialist periods have mainly been related to farm policies and the environmental consciousness of land users and society as a whole.