Digital reference library of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Fairy Tales

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Holger Ehrhardt; Professor Dr. Frank Puppe; Dr. Yong-Mi Rauch; Privatdozent Dr. Christian Reul
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature) ; History of Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536456928

The private library of the Brothers Grimm is considered one of the most significant private collections in the field of early German Studies. Its value lies not only in the many rare works with a direct connection to the research interests of these internationally renowned scholars, but also in the various annotations left by Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm as they used the books for their studies. Access to these resources has so far been largely limited to the originals, which require time-consuming page-by-page evaluation. Digitization of the collection is therefore highly desirable. Digital access would open doors to new methods and approaches in academic research into the materials. The numerous traces of provenance pose a challenge for digitization, since the existing methods of automatic character or layout recognition do not provide established procedures to produce searchable full transcripts of annotated texts including the evaluation of handwritten artefacts. This project undertakes to digitize part of the Grimm Library – namely the reference library of Grimm’s Fairy Tales – in order to test methods of segmentation by training neural networks for this purpose. The aim is a reliable automated distinction between printed and handwritten text, the transcription of both text types, and the recognition of individual handwritings. Additionally, the program should categorize the traces of provenance. For the project the University Library of the Humboldt-Universität (HU) will digitize about 700 volumes from the reference library that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm used for their collection of fairy tales. The titles were selected according to philological criteria, mainly based on the Grimms’ own notes and comments on the sources used for their work. The majority of this collection is located at the Humboldt-Universität, with some additional volumes from other institutions. The technical development will be led by the Chair for Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Systems and by the Zentrum für Philologie und Digitalität “Kallimachos” at the University of Würzburg. The “Fachgebiet für Werk und Wirken der Brüder Grimm” is responsible for the philological aspects of the project. The results of the project will be preserved permanently and published for further use. The project output will be an openly accessible digital reference library that includes images, full texts and handwritten artefacts. A web viewer will allow users to navigate between the annotations and offer specific research functions. The marks of provenance and traces of use by the Brothers Grimm, as well as the transcriptions of handwritten notes, will be philologically evaluated. We aim to create a workflow routine that will enable the digitization of other segments of the Grimm Library and other scholars’ libraries in the future.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigators: Professor Andreas Degkwitz, Ph.D.; Martin Lee