Digital Edition of the Correspondence of August Wilhelm Schlegel

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Among the most important German-speaking authors, critics and scholars, August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767 to 1845) is the most versatile and at the same time the most underestimated one. The digital edition of his correspondence, begun in 2012, has already noticeably stimulated research on Schlegel and Romanticism in the last decade. The project makes a substantial contribution to the History of Science in the 19th century and illustrates the importance of letter-writing as a genre for the developing field of the Humanities. According to current calculations, A.W. Schlegel’s extant correspondence comprises about 5,050 letters, consisting of around 2,350 handwritten documents from 76 international institutions as well as about 2,700 printed letters published in 170 separate publications in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The total number was higher than expected. In order to ensure the philological quality of the edition, we are seeking a follow-up funding for 18 months. The digital edition project has already developed, for the first time, a re-usable Open Source-workflow encompassing every step from the registration and digitization of every letter, the digital edition itself, up to the long-term preservation of all the relevant data. This model will ensure that future ambitious edition projects involving multiple cooperation partners will be able to implement their objectives faster and cheaper. The project will be accompanied by international workshops and regards itself as an important contribution to scholarly collaboration via the internet. In order to finalize the technical infrastructure, the project requests funding for 8 months full-time as well as 18 months part-time (25%) work for final developments and technical support.