ACDH Lecture 12.1

From Punch Cards to Prompt Engineering: The MHDBDB and the Future of Semantic Annotation with LLMs

with Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer , Senior Scientist at the University of Salzburg and Julia Hintersteiner , Senior Scientist and PhD candidate at the University of Salzburg

When: Tuesday, January 20th 2026; 16:45 - 18:15

Where: University of Vienna, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Vienna,
Hörsaal 6 Franz König Hauptgebäude, Tiefparterre, Stiege 9 Hof 5 and online (u:stream).

Registration: closed.

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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 .

Please RSVP for the onsite-lecture / register for the online lecture.

This ACDH Lecture is organized in close collaboration with the University of Vienna within the framework of the Digital Humanities Lecture Circuit .

about the speakers