The German Letter in the 18th Century - Building up a comprehensive dataset and collaborative network for digitizing and investigating the German letter in the age of Enlightenment

• Applicants: Stefan Dumont; Professorin Dr. Elisabeth Décultot; Professor Dr. Thomas Stäcker
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491395612

The project, designed as a multi-level process, aims at establishing a co-operative network, creating a representative digital collection and a portal dedicated to the "German" letter of the 18th century. Letters of that period that will be accessible via metadata, images, and full texts have been written in or sent to the German speaking area. This also includes letters sent to recipients outside of the German speaking area and conversely letters sent from outside to this area. Basically, the corpus implies all languages, but the German, Latin and French language are likely to prevail. The goal of the first phase is to create a reliable and comprehensive corpus and data set that provides researchers with an homogenous and trustworthy database of hitherto scattered and widely inaccessible data. By drawing on existing infrastructures a participatory portal will be set up that offers access to comprehensive data and metadata collections according to the FAIR principles and open access in order to support digital humanists.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)