CoReMA – Cooking Recipes of the Middle Ages 
Astrid Böhm, Julia Eibinger, Helmut W. Klug, Christian Steiner
The international project CoReMa seeks to conduct intercultural research into medieval recipes and their interrelations using an interdisciplinary approach. The handwritten recipe traditions of France and the German-speaking countries up to 1500 AD are examined in terms of their origin, their relationship to each other and their migration through Europe. This corpus includes more than 80 manuscripts and about 800 recipes. The texts in question have been handed down in Early New High German, Medieval Latin and Middle French. These multilingual texts are prepared in line with modern standards and analysed using current quantitative and qualitative research methods. To enable computer-aided analysis, the recipe collections, their contained texts and metadata are modelled in TEI/XML (digital transcription and edition) and examined via Semantic Web technologies (digital annotation and data visualisation). The data are fed into a long-term archiving infrastructure (GAMS, Institute Centre for Information Modelling) in which it can be further researched. All recipes are enriched using vocabularies for ingredients, cooking processes and kitchen tools as well as for metadata relevant to history and culture (e.g. religious, cultural or medicinal aspects). Based on this information the project is able to unearth competing or diverging eating habits across language borders, text migration as well as mutual influence of neighbouring countries on their respective cuisines. NLP methods are used for analysis of the German texts regarding historical language stages to examine text relations in the written records.
Workflows and data acquired during the project will be made available for further use in line with the Open Science concepts and FAIR-principles:
Transcription workflow and transcription principles (theory and practice, in cooperation with KONDE) can be fully re-used. The annotation vocabularies (ingredients, dishes, kitchen tools, instructions) will be made available including all assigned semantic Wikidata-concepts and thus form an essential base for further research in the field of culinary history. Available concepts in Wikidata 1 are checked and enriched with additional data (e.g. links of relevant ontologies, for example FoodOn2 or SNOMED3) where applicable. Concepts not yet available are created. In addition to practical considerations, the main aim of using Wikidata is to make the data acquired in the project easily available to the community and to enable further use of this data. In addition, the annotation scripts (Python and XSLT) for the transfer of annotation vocabularies to TEI/XML will be available for download. Text data will be offered in plain text for further use by NLP tools.
The recipe texts are uniformly recorded by a hyperdiplomatic re-transcription of the historical sources and will also be available for further use as TEI/XML. The transcription of the source text not only notes the difference in character inventory, but all text-structuring elements. The entire character inventory is recorded in a character description in line with TEI guidelines. The description is based on the theoretical results for describing characters from the DigiPal project and also uses the character identifiers of the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative.
The produced data are not only the starting point for research questions of the project, but form a solid base for further research in the fields of German Studies/Linguistics, Palaeography, etc. Furthermore, the CoReMA project will provide a model for integration of additional texts in the research environment. The project aims to provide (technical) impulses for all disciplines concerned with medieval and early modern history, culinary history, Digital Scholarly Edition and Digital Humanities.
Notes:
1 https://www.wikidata.org
2 http://foodon.org/
3 https://browser.ihtsdotools.org/