Tonka – The Digital City Encyclopaedia of Stuttgart
Project details
Tonka: Stuttgart’s Digital City Encyclopaedia – The Bean That Grows from the City’s History!
Tonka is a digital city encyclopaedia that brings Stuttgart’s history to life in an innovative way. The web application combines academically researched content with modern digital technologies, allowing users to explore historical places, people and events directly on an interactive map.
What has Tonka achieved so far?What has Tonka achieved so far?
Tonka was developed on behalf of the Stuttgart City Archives and is freely available at www.stadtlexikon-stuttgart.de. The project has been nominated for the Grimme Online Award – and rightly so, as it offers:
- an intuitive map view as well as historical maps with a comparison feature
- a timeline for organising content chronologically
- versioning of the articles so that previous versions remain traceable
- extensive image galleries, often featuring original documents, photographs or maps
- state-of-the-art web technology – with a focus on accessibility, for example through a high-contrast colour scheme or a text-to-speech function for articles
- nominated for the Grimme Online Award 2019 – zur Nominierung
The next step? Tonka will become open source!
We will soon make Tonka’s code available as open source. Why? We believe that urban history is a collaborative endeavor – and other cities, archives, or developers should benefit from our technology.
