Duration of project / time frame: 2000-2010
The project is a pilot scheme responding to the general need to consider as a historical source the surviving notarial documents from various regions in Greece from the end of the Middle Ages to the 20th century in toto. The objective will be to allow a quantitative analysis and subsequent interpretation of the documents and to chart significant issues of medieval and modern Greek history. The data should be subsequently compared with information obtained from other sources. Comparisons with similar primary sources from other European Mediterranean countries would be desirable.
Objectives
The aim of the specific project is to produce a computerised data base which will be fed with data contained in marriage contracts of the period 1500-1830 from any region of Greece. The limited number of later contracts included are indicative of the persistence of the institution but also of the changes that took place in the 20th century.
The ultimate objective is to investigate the spectrum of variations in the system of inheritance and the type of family in their development and in their actual social and economic dimensions, at a Pan-Hellenic and ideally a comparative European level. However,the database contains all retrievable data, much of which may be used to address other types of issues, for example linguistic issues, questions of material culture, and so on.
Manner of implementation
At this stage, mainly published marriage contracts and other marriage settlements have been used. In view of the fact that in the last century many documents of this kind have been printed in various professional or local publications, students of the University of Crete helped to conduct extensive bibliographical research and card-indexing in order to collect the greatest possible volume of available material. Subsequently, the documents were photocopied and scanned At the same time, a system of subject classification of the marriage contracts was designed and developed, and consists of a relational data base (extended ER model) with the thesaurus tool MultiTes incorporated.
Classification system of marriage documents.
The development of the system of subject classification of marriage documents was created to facilitate their management and study by researchers. During the semantic approach to the inner structure of the texts of the documents, the intention was to deconstruct the information and subsequently to recompose it in a practical conceptual tool which would allow speedy classification of the material and retrieval of data and information.
In view of the needs of the programme and the special nature of the archival material (volume, variety of subjects, language) the basic criteria as regards the development of the system were: rapid classification, giving precedence to the completeness of the retrieved information and the greatest possible accuracy of retrieval, retrieval speed, clarity of information and user-friendliness of the system.
An extended entity-relationship model - EER - was created in which a thesaurus of terms was incorporated and developed with the multi-lingual thesaurus MultiTes. The system supports the uniform semantic alphabetization of the documents and represents a new application of the design model of APXON (1999-2000, ITE) in a relationship data base, with the capability of data access via the Internet. The operating platform of the application is Windows XP.
There were four stages in the implementation of the project: requirements analysis, conceptual design, technical design and implementation (with an indicative number of entries, checking and evaluation of the system).
