Early Romanticism
By “Early Romanticism” we mean the group of like-minded people around the Schlegel brothers, Caroline Schlegel, Dorothea Veit, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Shortly before the turn of the century, this circle formed in Jena and Berlin. It also revolved around the journal Athenaeum and drew attention through revolutionary, often polemical gesture as well as through “experiments in form” under the banners of poetry and transcendental philosophy. In our considerations, we include an associate like Johann Gottlieb Fichte as well as the Berlin salonnière Rahel Levin. Since we are interested in all the correspondence of these individuals, role models such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, business partners such as publishers Cotta, Unger and Vieweg as well as critics and opponents play just as important a role as close friends and family members.
Our Corpus
We offer scholars as well as an interested public a platform with the correspondences of Early Romanticism in (literary, philosophical) Jena and Berlin during the period from 1790 to 1802. In addition to the “big names” mentioned above, there are also less prominent companions such as Johann Diederich Gries, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, August Ludwig Hülsen, and others.
Making edited collections of correspondence accessible online, closing the gaps
An open-access presentation of about 6,500 letters is in progress, using existing editions. In addition, the project is working on an editorial complementation of gaps, be they supplements to completed editions or the inclusion of letter writers to whom no edition has been dedicated so far. For each letter we offer: a reliably edited full text, digitized copy of the printed edition, partial manuscript images as well as standardized meta data and register data, including sender, place of sender, date, addressee, place of addressee, information on the provenance of the manuscript, a bibliographical indication of the print, several registers on the persons, work, places, corporations and periodicals mentioned in the letter. We link our metadata to standards linked open data from GND and GeoNames. Missing GND entries are to be gathered in cooperation with libraries as a part of our project; this also applies to the often-complex process of typesetting titles of works. We are particularly interested in lost letters, regardless of whether or not they have already been identified in the underlying editions.
A beta release of the project website is planned for the beginning of 2024.
Duration: 2022 - 2025, intended: 2028
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (JGU)
Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz (ADW)
Trier Center for Digital Humanities, Universität Trier (TCDH)
Project Management:
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Breuer, JGU
Prof. Dr. Aline Deicke, ADW Mainz und Philipps-Universität Marburg
Dr. Thomas Burch, TCDH
Codirector:
Prof. Dr. Anne Bohnenkamp-Renken, Freies Deutsches Hochstift/Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a. M.
Prof. Dr. Christof Schöch, Universität Trier
Project team JGU:
Laura Dänekas
Laura Fath, M.A.
Nora Görsch, B.A.
Martha Prohaska
Laura Relitzki, B.A.
Lisa Kampfert
Max Schotte
Prof. Dr. Jochen Strobel
Clara Seibold, B.A.
Elena Suárez Cronauer, M.A.
Dipl.-Soz. Michael Lambertz
Sandra Weyand, M.Sc.
Our basis: the previous project
A digital edition of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s correspondences (Digitale Edition der Korrespondenz August Wilhelm Schlegels, KAWS) was created with DFG funding between 2012 and 2021. Well over 5,000 letters are available digitally in full text and mostly also as images of the manuscript at https://august-wilhelm-schlegel.de. The website is bilingual in German and English.
About half were transcribed anew and had never appeared in print; the second half are based on the reuse of about 120 print editions. Differentiated, faceted searches are possible. A PDF can be created on-the-fly for each letter (full text, metadata). XML-TEI markup can be retrieved for each letter as well as for the entire corpus. For optimal usability we offer: uniform metadata (letterhead or structural data; register), usually (and as far as possible) notation per GND standard and linking to GND files. The project has created hundreds of GND files about personal names in cooperation with the Saxony State Library – Dresden State and University Library (Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden, SLUB) and the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, DNB).
Semantic annotations of statements in letters
We manually convert selected statements in letters into a subject-predicate-object structure. In these annotations, previously recorded register entities (names, work titles, periodicals, corporate bodies, usually in GND notation) are linked via a two-part predicate structure consisting of illocution and proposition. With this approach we follow linguistic standards, namely Speech Act Theory, which distinguishes between illocutionary act and proposition. In this case, the register data form the subject and the object of the statement, respectively. Subjects are always persons (usually it is the letter writer), objects are persons, corporations, titles of works and periodicals.
The primary goal of these identifications is to open up the processes of intellectual exchange and the traces of collaborative work as documented in the letter texts for a formal quantitative analysis; in addition, we want to provide the users of our edition platform with an additional search option. This expansion of our register simultaneously gives rise to a controlled, reusable vocabulary for correspondence around 1800 in SKOS, a standard for representing and sharing knowledge systems and for expressing the structure, content and relationships of concepts.
Ontology
One project goal is to model an ontology representing the domain of correspondences of Early Romanticism within their research context. An ontology is a formal system of hierarchically structured concepts linked with logical relations, that allows implicit knowledge of a domain to be made explicit. It also serves as a form of knowledge representation of a part of reality, in our case the correspondences of the major participants in Early Romanticism around 1800.
By developing generic and general concepts from the specific statements in the source material concerning a concrete “thing” and presenting them as Linked Open Data, the CER ontology can be adapted to and reused by further research projects concerning the period around 1800 or the letter as a medium of communication.
Further goals of the three project teams
Knowledge Graph (ADW)
The Knowledge Graph maps the knowledge domain of Early Romantic correspondence and their research context based on the CER ontology. In a graph database, entities or concepts are stored as nodes and their relationships to each other as edges. The vocabularies of illocutions and propositions, together with the register-related and other metadata in the letters, are incorporated into the Knowledge Graph data model, if possible as norm data. Through this linked open data approach, further enrichment of the graph with information from external data sources such as the GND becomes possible. Additionally, the graph is completed and extended by graph completion and preliminary reasoning routines.
Graph and Network Theoretical Analysis (JGU/ADW)
Based on the annotations and the data models, analyses are performed using quantitative as well as qualitative network methods. The networks under investigation are exported from the enriched Knowledge Graph. The network analysis will serve to explore the communication structures and knowledge transfer in the “Early Romanticism” correspondence network. Structures of the Jena (and Berlin) Early Romanticism network as well as its genesis and development can thus be reconstructed as relational phenomena.
Semantic similarity analysis (TCDH)
Der Knowledge Graph wird zudem durch Verknüpfungen zwischen Briefen ergänzt, die auf der semi-automatisch ermittelten stilistisch-semantischen Ähnlichkeit der in ihnen enthaltenen Sätze beruhen. Indem das semantische Profil jedes Satzes berechnet und die Ähnlichkeit der Satzvektoren aller im Korpus enthaltenen Sätze zueinander ermittelt wird, lassen sich besonders ähnliche Briefe ausmachen. Neben dieser zusätzlichen Schicht der Verbindungen von Briefen wird eine Anschlusssuche ermöglicht, bei der zu einem bestimmten Brief diejenigen Briefe aufgefunden werden können, die ähnliche Formulierungen und Inhalte aufweisen.
Long term?
TCDH Trier is responsible for providing (under CC-BY-4.0) and (long-term) hosting of all data. Reliable citation of the data is guaranteed. There is a plan to mirror the research data on the servers of the Mainz Academy.
Our partners
We cooperate closely with the project “The German Letter in the 18th Century” (ULB Darmstadt, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, BBAW) for the imaging and full text digitization of the underlying editions as well as the associated metadata.
Other cooperation partners include also:
- die Arbeitsstelle „Schleiermacher in Berlin“ der BBAW
- das PROPYLÄEN-Projekt zu Goethes Biographica (Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Digitale Akademie Mainz, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig)
- die Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (zu Schelling)
- die Arbeitsstelle Friedrich und Dorothea Schlegel an der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
The presentation of the letters will be provided via BBAW's (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften) webservice correspSearch.