correspSearch - Connecting Scholarly Editions of Letters

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christoph Markschies, since 10/2020
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature) ; History of Philosophy ; Musicology ; Modern and Contemporary History ; History of Science
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 331658768

Letters are important historical sources. In recent years, interest in indexing, annotation and publication of (historical) letters has grown significantly. Research on corrsepondence as a means of communication and self-representation has grown as well. The correspSearch web service has opened up new possibilities for digital scholarly editions (of correspondence) and the modeling of their inherent interconnectedness. Subsequently new, additional requirements have risen, which the project applied for here is intended to meet. The functional scope of the web service correspSearch and its tools (CMIF Creator, csLink) will be considerably expanded and adapted for these new requirements.At the center of further development is the extension of the search functions and query options. For the search process, authority files (e.g. GND) will be integrated even more extensively. Not only cross-project IDs for people but also other information such as occupation will be made available as search criteria. An encouraging trend in recent years has been the increasing publication of full texts in Open Access via standardised interfaces. With further development, this will be accomodated by adding the possibility of a full text search to correspSearch. This will also be possible in cases where providers of digital scholarly editions with pay-walls want to make their full texts searchable. The visualisation of correspondence metadata has also been a topic for letter-related research for several years. Recently, this aspect has gained additional attention, especially with regard to scholarly editions of correspondence as well as digital scholarly editions in general. Therefore, the visualization options in correspSearch will be significantly expanded.The project aims to optimize the already successfully implemented web service correspSearch for the latest requirements of scholarly communities that want to explore the medium of letters not only in a classical “close reading”, but also in an automated, computational “distant reading”.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Participating Institution: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften; Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften; Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig
• Co-Investigator: Alexander Czmiel
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Martin Grötschel, until 10/2020