WossiDiA A Pioneer of Digitized Tradition Archives and Its Hypergraph Technology

This article sheds light on the digital transformation of Richard Wossidlo's regional ethnographic and linguistic collection into the research environment WossiDiA. The Digital Wossidlo Archive is based on making handwritten sources and their indexing visible to users. It has been implemented as a hypergraph database, whose abundance of node and hyperedge types is suitable for representing the diversity and delicate nature of the tradition archive. This paper will discuss how proprietary properties have been preserved in the transformation process and how the digital collection is compatible with big data scenarios. Follow-up projects have contributed to this. "Efficiency," the necessity of resource-saving, will also be problematized. Finally, it will be shown how a sparse ethnographic fieldnote can be enriched into a complex hypergraph extract, a method which is reminiscent of dragnet detection.