The governmental districts of the Prussian Rhine Province reported on economic, social and political developments, but also, for example, on weather observations or epidemics in so-called governmental district reports, which were prepared according to certain fixed schemes. These numerous handwritten sources are pre-formatted in terms of content and combine, on the one hand, an exact localizability of the events mentioned and, on the other hand, their exact datability, thus also enabling a validatable AI/NLP-based analysis of the content with the methods of topic modeling. 

Which topics can thus be extracted automatically and which algorithms and architectures of Topic Modeling can be used optimally for this purpose will be determined in this project. A further data-based analysis of the correlations of the topics and events extracted in this way will enable the study of the effects of crop failures, uprisings, epidemics, but also the lifting of customs barriers or the construction of transport infrastructure among and on top of each other in the context of the economic history of the Rhine Province.