Germany's Typographic Legacy in the Industrial Age – A Pilot Project for Mass Digitization of Historical Type Specimens (1820–2000)

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Achim Bonte; Frank Scholze; Professor Dr. Nikolaus Weichselbaumer
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558042196

The richness and diversity of typographic culture in Germany in the industrial age is not only reflected in the surviving wood, lead and plastic typefaces and the products made with them, but also in the typefaces that have only survived as proofs, as can be found in thousands of so-called type specimens. These ephemeral sample books, ranging in size from one sheet to hundreds of pages, were used by foundries to advertise selected typefaces or to market their entire range of types, characters and decorative elements. Although printed typefaces are often overlooked in their omnipresence in everyday life, the material turn in conjunction with the rise of the digital humanities has also led to a rapid increase in academic interest in typography beyond art history and book studies – particularly on the part of textual materiality research and machine pattern recognition. Moreover, type samples are of great importance for the creative industries, as even digitally designed fonts are usually derived from historical models. In order to create a representative foundation of sources in open access for this research trend and to help typography gain greater visibility as an important testimony to industrial culture, this project pursues three goals: First and foremost, it is about digitizing and making permanently accessible the type specimens published after the end of the hand press era in the German-speaking world from the complementary typographic collections of Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and Kunstbibliothek – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, amounting to a total of 6.350 objects. In order to optimize the indexing level of these three corpora, which are among the most important collections of historical type specimens in Germany in terms of volume and quality, the second project goal is the creation of authority data of selected fonts – based on a classification scheme to be designed together with the scientific community. Specifically, this includes both the revision of the typographic authority data already available in the GND and the creation of at least 300 new entries. Thirdly and finally, the transcription of selected type samples is planned as training material to improve optical character recognition. Beyond the proposed project, these three goals are linked to the perspective expectation of creating the basis for cross-disciplinary digital access to Germany's typographic cultural heritage along the lines of the DDB subportals – with the integration of citizen science components. Because of its sheer size and its scattered transmission in private collections of type specimens, the systematic documentation and digitization of the typographic cultural heritage can only be realized collaboratively. The establishment of such a national typeface memory, open in all dimensions, is what its applicants are striving for as a follow-up project to this project.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Moritz Wullen