Sources of the New: Factual and scientific knowledge for amateurs and experts from the Enlightenment to Modernism (discipline-specific working group 9)

In January 2015 the discipline-specific working group 9 "Modern History" (F-AG 9) received approval for its Curation Project, which subsequently started in February 2015. Prof. Gerhard Lauer (Georg August University Göttingen) is responsible for project content and Maret Keller (Georg August University Göttingen /Georg Eckert Institute Braunschweig) und Christian Wachter (Georg August University Göttingen) are responsible for implementation. Technical advice and assistance for this project will be provided by the CLARIN-D centre in the Institut für Deutsche Sprache [Institute of the German Language] in Mannheim (IDS) as well as the CLARIN-D centre in the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften [The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities].

Project content

The project will prepare and investigate a digital corpus comprised of textbooks as well as texts published by university scholar Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) and his circle, which will enable historians to analyze the connections and relations between school teaching and the production and transfer of knowledge in the university context.

Allowing for data standards and normalisations, in particular the CLARIN-D standards, selected history source texts (from GEI-Digital and the Project "Johann Friedrich Blumenbach – online" run by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities) will be added to a CLARIN-D repository. In addition to enhancing the data, this process has the added benefits of raising the profile of the material as well as allowing centralized access and simplified interaction with other data and digital tools provided by CLARIN-D. These tools will subsequently be tested and evaluated for their compatibility with the requirements and working methods of historians. The resulting data will provide a practical insight into how resources of differing depth and granularity can be prepared in order to enable research questions from the historical sciences and related disciplines to be better addressed, specifically in terms of the use of digital methods, procedures and tools.