Usage information on the index of places

The index of places is a directory of all locations mentioned in the “Teutsche Academie”. Not only can you locate references to places (countries, cities, rivers and so on) in the text, but the database entry for a place additionally displays all names used and allows you to search explicitly for them.

Information About the Search

You can enter one or more terms in the search field, enclose phrases in quotation marks and exclude undesired terms by preceding them with a minus sign (hyphen). In each of these cases, the system always searches in all available names and existing annotations (that is, the names as they are used in the text).

In addition, the search terms are also found within words—the entries Frankfurt, frank and kfurt would therefore find results such as the city of Frankfurt in the index of places. There is an exception in this respect only for search terms that consist of two characters, for example the river Po: These must be identical to the name or the annotation.
Furthermore, the search is not case-sensitive.

The search for places is made more difficult by the fact that the names can vary significantly, as the example of Aachen illustrates: The city is known in other countries by names such as Aken, Aix-la-Chapelle or Aquisgrana. Additionally, the names of buildings can be language-specific and more than one name can be in use even in a single language. We have endeavoured to add to the entries names that differ to the German version where this makes sense and is necessary. Nevertheless, if your search query does not return the desired results, you should also try using a version in another language or written in a different way, for example St. Peter instead of Sankt Peter.

Some examples of search queries:

  • florenz palazzo: Finds all entries that contain both terms as an entire word or part of a word. Entering firenze palazzo would return the same results.
  • frank -reich: Finds entries including “Frankfurt” and “Franken”, but not “Frankreich”.
  • "St. Peter": Finds all entries for places in which “St. Peter” occurs as a phrase.
  • "Rom, St. Peter": Finds all entries for places in which “Rom, St. Peter” occurs as a phrase.
  • "rom," peter: Displays (see next section for the reason) all search results for “peter” in Rome—including St. Peter’s Square and St. Peter’s Basilica.

Hierarchy of places

Cities and places inside cities are hierarchically linked. Thanks to this, you can easily access superordinate places or subordinate places using the relation links that are displayed on the right-hand side in a place’s record. Moreover, these hierarchical links can be used to search for a whole hierarchy of places, i.e.: all text occurrences of a place including text occurrences of all its subordinate places. To achieve this, please click the “Include occurrences of subordinate places” on the page.

Also, the naming scheme for places uses this hierarchy: All places that can be perceived as part of a city have been entered according to the pattern “city name, place name”. Therefore this is a reliable method of restricting search results to a specific city, and is the reason why in the last of the search examples above (the search for "rom," peter) you will only get places in Rome.

Information About the Search Results

Relevant are the names as chosen by Sandrart. If an entry mentions “The Netherlands” for example, it contains those places in the text where Sandrart used this name—not those entries that mention the modern-day territory of The Netherlands. Equally, the search term “Rome, Temple of Peace” searches for those places in the text where Sandrart comments on the “Templum Pacis” or portrays it in a copper engraving, regardless of the fact that we know today that the building in question is the Basilica of Maxentius. In such cases, in which Sandrart reflects the antiquated state of knowledge of the 17th century, we have added the search term synonym “Basilica of Maxentius” to the entries but made it invisible to the user. This makes it possible to find the building under its current name as well.

In those cases where a building has had various functions over the centuries and thus different names as well, we created more than one entry and linked them to one another using the relationships “preceding building” and “subsequent building” respectively (for example Rome, Mausoleum of Hadrian and Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo).