The journeys of the botanist Carl Haussknecht (1838 - 1903) to the Ottoman Empire and Persia (1865 and 1866 - 1869). The annotated digital edition of his travel diaries

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The internationally renowned Herbarium Haussknecht, founded on October 18, 1896, in Weimar by the Thuringian botanist Carl Haussknecht (1838-1903) and currently located at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, houses among its 3.5 million plant specimens thousands of specimens that Haussknecht collected during his travels in the Ottoman Empire and Persia in the years 1865 and 1866-1869. His by now transcribed 1000 page travel diaries provide a hitherto unexplored context for this collection and they are the centrepiece of this project, conducted by an interdisciplinary team including botanists belonging to the herbarium and specialists in Middle Eastern studies, mainly 19th century Ottoman Empire and Persia. Going far beyond botany, the travel diaries provide expert information and detailed observations on geology, geography, cartography, zoology, but also regional, social, and cultural studies and histories. The related georeferenced maps allow for the precise localisation of the herbarium specimens and the reconstruction of Haussknecht’s itineraries, which differed from the common itineraries of that time. Further archival material such as correspondence, an album amicorum (autograph book) and carte de visite-photographs are additional elements that enrich and deepen the critical evaluation and contextual interpretation. With the usage of a modular software (FuD, Trier) for generating a digital edition, the whole corpus is processed, indexed (plants, persons, places, things, including if applicable spelling variants and local terminology) and annotated. It is gradually being made available in the project portal (http://haussknecht.thulb.uni-jena.de/index.php?id=301) that has been created in cooperation with the Thuringian University and State Library in Jena (ThULB).The annotated critical edition of the travel diaries, including further archival material, provide for the contextualisation of the herbarium‘s founding collection and help to appropriately acknowledge Haussknecht‘s scientific personality and his contribution to systematic botany and the development of Oriental botany. It also has an important contribution to make to the histories of science, culture and reception of the regions in question in the second half of the 19th century. Numerous project presentations and thematic talks within various disciplines have attracted wide interest. In consequence, the team has been invited to publish an edited volume (I.B. Tauris) and has also established contacts and developed networks with other research projects. The annotated digital edition will provide a virtual research infrastructure that offers the potential for future advanced quantitative and qualitative analyses in various disciplines.