Digitization and in-depth exploration of the estate of Gotthold Schwela

• Applicant: Dr. Annett Bresan
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2020 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442986265

Gotthold Schwela (Sorbian: Bogumił Šwjela) was a significant representative of the Sorbian elite of the 20th century due to his curriculum vitae and work. Born in 1873 as the son of a village school teacher and newspaper editor, he studied theology and Slavic Philology studies, became a pastor in the Sorbian Lower Lusatia and, in addition to his profession, worked as a linguist, publicist, writer/translator and cultural politician.For his lifetime (Empire, Weimar Republic, Nazi regime) there is no comparable record collection that offers such a dense documentation of the Lower Sorbian language, everyday culture and efforts to preserve and further develop it from the perspective of an actor.The Schwela´s estate contains mostly handwritten documents on state and church policy towards the Sorbs, on the self-organisation of Sorbian cultural life, language-historical collections on field names, family and place names, grammar, a dictionary collection as well as an ethnological-linguistic collection on all facets of Lower Sorbian folk culture.The aim is the formal and content-related in-depth exploration of the collection, where appropriate down to document level, and the provision of the corresponding image files.The digitisation of this archival fond generally facilitates access from any location for the archival use which is not located at the centre of research in the humanities and especially not in the regional sphere of influence of Schwela. On the one hand, it serves to document the acutely endangered Lower Sorbian language and, on the other hand, it reduces the language barrier for the use of the material by cultural scientists without Sorbian language skills.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Wito Böhmak