May 11, 2012
L’édition numérique “Lettres et textes. Le Berlin intellectuel des années 1800” est en cours de réalisation et devrait être achevée courant 2015; les premiers corpus ont été mis en ligne en mars 2012. Réalisée par le groupe de recherche junior “Les intellectuels berlinois entre 1800 et 1830″, elle est en fait moins centrée sur le premier tiers du XIXème siècle qu’il n’y paraît.
L’objectif scientifique qui constitue la matrice de l’édition en matière de codage et de mise en page est bien celui du groupe de recherche, mais il est focalisé sur un ensemble de textes et de personnes choisis pour leur représentativité.
L’idée générale consiste à tâcher de mettre en évidence les stratégies de communications mises en oeuvre par les hommes (et femmes) de lettres et de sciences pour se positionner sur la scène publique. Il s’agit ainsi de montrer que les débats littéraires et scientifiques sont toujours aussi des débats politiques, et comment.
Cette question générale s’articule en quatre ligne directrices, qui se retrouvent dans les corpus choisis:
- quel rôle joue l’influence de la culture francaise dans la Prusse intellectuelle? C’est principalement cette question qui a amené à revenir en arrière dans le temps pour intégrer un corpus XVIIIèmiste, sans lequel l’émergence de la nouveauté de la période autour de 1800 serait difficile à mettre en évidence. Deux corpus se répondent ainsi sur cette question: la correspondance (francaise) d’Adolf von Buch et Louis de Beausobre des années 1760-1770, qui montrent de manière exemplaire les structures de circulation – francophone – des savoirs dans la Prusse frédéricienne. De l’autre côté de la ligne de démarcation “1800″, il s’agit des lettres (allemandes, mais entrelacées de francais) entre Adelbert von Chamisso et Louis de La Foye;
- dans quelle mesure la création de l’université à Berlin a-t-elle cristallisé et accentué la présence d’intellectuels sur la scène publique? C’est d’abord l’étude des papiers d’August Boeckh qui ouvre le plus de pistes sur ce point, en particulier dans la mesure où Boeckh est à la fois professeur à l’université et membre de l’Académie des Sciences. La correspondance de la “Société du vendredi”, dont les membres les plus éminents (Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Friedrich von Raumer, Karl Solger) étaient eux aussi professeurs à l’université de Berlin, viendra compléter ce corpus au niveau professoral. Il est également intéressant de voir comment la formation universitaire a pu marquer des générations. Les deux séries de notes de cours de F.A. Wolf et de Solger de l’année 1818 ont ainsi pour but de reconstituer l’horizon intellectuel ainsi ouvert. Des documents manuscrits relatifs à Immanuel Hermann Fichte devraient venir s’y ajouter.
- quelle est la marge de manoeuvre des écrivains, hommes et femmes? La question est plus simple à aborder en partant des hommes qu’en partant des femmes, pour des raisons évidentes de conservation des corpus. Il s’agit dans cette partie de mettre en relation nos corpus de lettres et des textes (littéraires ou scientifiques), de manière à mettre en évidence à la fois la genèse et la première réception de ces oeuvres. Nous travaillons ainsi en ce moment à un outil de collation permettant de mettrre en relation manuscrits et premières éditions. Les deux grandes figures qui sont déjà intégrées à l’édition sont d’une part Ludwig Tieck et d’autre part Adelbert von Chamisso. Du côté des femmes, c’est Helmina von Chézy qui devrait prendre place dans l’édition, mais sous une forme qui n’est pas encore clairement définie (lettres, textes?).
- bien que plus marginal, le quatrième aspect émerge transversalement dans quasiment tous les corpus; il s’agit de la réception de l’Antiquité et de son utilisation à des fins politiques. Les cours de F.A. Wolf, le projet de Boeckh à l’Académie des Sciences, les traductions du grec auxquelles se livrent la plupart des auteurs que nous éditons, en sont des exemples parlants.
Sa structure et le travail sur la mise en relation entre les différents éléments avec l’objectif de répondre à ces quatre questions sont à mon sens les points forts de cette édition. Pour l’heure, son contenu est encore trop léger pour qu’on puisse vraiment en tirer des conclusions à grande échelle. Il s’agit donc dans un premier temps d’ajouter des textes, et parallèlement de travailler à préciser nos outils de recherche de manière à pouvoir livrer des réponses concrètes aux questions ci-dessus.
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May 6, 2012
In 1813, Adelbert von Chamisso published a novel that became a major literary success. It was the story of Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow. He wrote the text during a stay in Kunersdorf, a hamlet 80 km east of Berlin. This is the place where the Chamisso Society held its yearly meeting yesterday within the facilities of the Kunersdorfer Musenhof, a house hosting a permanent exhibition dedicated to Chamisso.


I realized then how many different ways of looking at Chamisso’s life and work there can be, how many different ways there are to keep the memory of his achievements vivid.
Let me tell you why he became a major protagonist within my project. You could ask the same question to each and every member of the Chamisso Society – or, for that matter, each and every scholar who has dealt with the Chamisso corpus – and get a different answer. It is the beauty of such rich corpora that they allow to bring together different perspectives and hence to shed several kinds of light on it.
I had no idea that there exists no major edition of Chamisso’s work and manuscripts until I hired Anna Busch and Selma Jahnke. Anna had been working for years on the manuscripts of one of Chamisso’s best friends, Julius Eduard Hitzig, and she knew the early editions and the situation on the manuscripts’ side very good. Her plan when she started working in my group was (and still is, even if the digital edition has postponed the realization of that part to next year) to prepare a (book) edition of Hitzig’s correspondence with his poet friends, among which Chamisso plays a central role. Selma Jahnke came to the group with a dissertation project on Helmina von Chézy (gosh, I have to improve that wikipedia bio!), Chamisso’s lover in the 1810s. As for Helmina, we both knew that her printed work and manuscripts had never been considered as a “work” and treated as such in terms of scholarly edition. Both Helmina and Chamisso were literary active at the crossroads between France and Prussia, interacting with literary and scholarly networks, with publishers on both sides of the Rhine. Their brief love affair is also the story of a literary cooperation.
Both perspectives – the Hitzig one and the Helmina one – lead us to look more closely into the Chamisso manuscripts. There was one additional aspect – not a completely different one as they all are connected, but still another perspective – that seemed interesting to me in the context of my project. I had been working on the French-Prussian intellectual relationships in the late 18th century and was wondering how it would be possible to analyze the evolution with a counterpart in the early 19th century. Chamisso is for sure a representative candidate for that kind of analysis.
The different team member’s work lead to publications: Anna and Selma gave papers at the Chamisso Conference that took place in Paris in June 2011 and will have them published in the corresponding book. Selma’s paper analyzes the common literary work of Chamisso and Helmina in the 1810s; Anna’s paper deals with the Chamisso biography published by Hitzig after his friend’s death. Anna also constituted a corpus for our digital edition composed of 3 literary texts that were kept together in Hitzig’s papers. One of them is a publisher’s copy of Peter Schlemihl, which she has been encoding lately and we hope to have online at the end of Summer.
At some point, I realized that we had to do with a corpus that was likely to enrich greatly our digital approach, our questions and our method on that level. In fact, the Chamisso papers could possibly allow to see how letters can shed light on genesis and reception of literary works. At that point, we had to choose which letters to use and which tools to develop. The corpus we are working on now are the letters to Louis de La Foye (no wikipedia bio to this day, I promise to write it soon!), a childhood friend who, contrarily to Chamisso, returned and finally stayed in France. The letters extend to the 30 first years of the 19th century. They deal with politics, literature, natural sciences, French-Prussian intellectual relationships… We are editing this corpus together with a master’s class. My hope is that this corpus will allow us to develop our encoding on the level of linking together literary/scholarly works and letters.
In that project, we are working in close cooperation with the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK, the Deutsches Textarchiv, and René-Marc Pille, a French Chamisso specialist, who will be visiting this week (his conference has been announced on the Chamisso-Forum). And with all these different light spots, Chamisso will certainly have to come into the light – and then we will see whether it is with a shadow or not.
Thanks to Michael Bienert for the pictures (and for his post on our edition)!
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May 2, 2012
We are working on an improvement of the looks of our edition. The uncomfortable question of the corporate design came up again (how could it have been otherwise?), but I still don’t have a satisfying answer. What should we fill the visual memory of the user with: an image associated with the edition or an image associated with the research group?
A new item came up for which I dread just as much the implications of a clear cut: the corpora. For the time being, our “Letters and texts” contain eight of them: Franzosen in Berlin, Freitagsgesellschaft, Boeckhiana, Tieckiana, Chamisso-Briefe, Vorlesungsmitschriften, Romantische Schlüsseltexte. It mainly came to that by combining the corpora we could realistically hope to get edited until the end of the project on the one hand, and the repartition of the expertise of the editorial team on the other hand. I am responsible for 3 corpora, share one with Johanna; Anna is responsible for one corpus and shares one with Sabine; Sabine – well, obviously, shares one with Anna and has a whole other one for herself.
But it is not a very satisfactory structure. Some corpora are named after people, some after the literary genre they contain, some after a theme they deal with. By looking into it more closely, I had to admit those categories reflect mostly the process of the constitution of the edition. First, there were the letters I had been working on for 10-15 years and the letters I had discovered in the last five years. Then there were the things I had discovered in Chicago in 2007/2008 – mainly lecture notes that reactivated my passion for classical philology. Sabine has the material she wants to base her dissertation on; Anna has material she actually based her dissertation on. And then the categories also witness the literary turn we took a year or so ago. At some point, I got scared that letters would take us too far away from the philological approach of texts (we are not historians!). The encoding and the web interface that were initially developped for letters were extended to different kinds of texts. And are still going to evolve as the work on the lecture notes should become more important in a year or so.
Should we keep these categories or change them? Should we have clearer categories (letters, texts, lecture notes would be an option for instance)?
These questions have to do with the way we want to confront the canon. It is easier to hide behind Tieck, Chamisso and Boeckh than to define oneself through an unknown Prussian Ambassador or through some literary society nobody ever heard of (or if it is the case, then it is in reference to another one that carried the same name…). Should the image we brand ourselves with be the persons or should it be the networks? How do you make the networks visible? How can it be made structurally clear that it does not matter in which categories the corpora are distributed, since they are all connected together and the whole point is to retrace, for instance, how Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise appears in the first letters in the 1760s and is still present in the last letters in 1848, but changed in the way it is referred to…
So it all comes down to the networks – again. I knew the networks were a tricky concept and that is why I left them out of my project title. In fact, I still do not know how it is possible to assert oneself as a good philologist while operating with networks. Only three more years to find out…
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April 25, 2012
After initiating what turned out to be an animated debate on the TEI-list, we had still not settled on anything yet concerning the Geminationsstriche on the m and the n, which still appear in the form m[m] and n[n] in the edition as it is.
There were all in all two valid options:
- encoding it as a macron in the form: Som& # 772;er (I had to add a few spaces for html to not transform it into an actual macron…) for Sommer and Son& # 772;e for Sonne;
- encoding it as a glyph in the form: So<g ref=”#mgem”/>er for Sommer and So<g ref=”#ngem”/> for Sonne
The first option is not fully satisfactory as we would have had to encode the diplomatical version and the reading version differently, which means that it would have come up to something like:
So<choice><abbr>m& # 772;</abbr><expan>mm</expan></choice> (or maybe use a <sic>/<corr> combination within the choice element, but it does not make much difference). This would make encoding Geminationsstriche somewhat tedious.
In the second option, it would be possible to define the “mgem”/”ngem” in such a way that we could spare us the use of the choice element while encoding. But this option is not really satisfactory either considering the Geminationsstrich is not a glyph but a macron. And if anyone was to reuse our XML file for whatever use, we would have to add this definition in the header and it would just add a layer of work and complexity, increase the error potential, etc.
So Alexander Meyer came up with the idea that we encode in the “light” form Som& # 772;er for Sommer and Son& # 772;e for Sonne and he writes a script (for internal use only), that makes all the necessary transformation to get the different versions. The XML-file is encoded properly, we have our two versions and the encoding is not massively more complex.
I can imagine that you could object this and that, but honestly, considering how our project works, this seems the best optimization we can get to me in terms of scholarly reliability, work economy and sustainability.
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April 23, 2012
Almost a year ago – wait, no, I have to go back further in time. Two years ago, the Humboldt University created an award for women junior researchers. The award was to carry the name of the wife of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Caroline. The first year the award was offered was the last possible application year for me: first, because of the age limit (35 seems to be one of those symbolical numbers for which the whole institution wants you to change categories, whether you want it or not), and second, because the application requirements changed completely the year after. When I applied, the award was opened to all disciplines. As a comparison, you can find the actual application conditions here.
So I was awarded the Caroline von Humboldt prize in October 2010, right in the middle of the jubilee celebrations. I had received my project donation 3 months earlier, I had just hired my team and it was , considering my expenses back then, a lot of money (boy, did that change when I started setting up a digital edition…), the sun was shining, and thank you Caroline.
The only thing I knew about her was that she had raised her children herself (not so common a habit amongst 18th-19th century nobility) and that she was at some point friends with Rahel Levin. The symbolical connection between that kind of life path and encouraging young women in their scientific or, for that matter, academic career, did not strike me, but I did not care at first.
And then came the ceremony itself. It was only then that I realized how controversial the name was. Caroline von Humboldt was anything but an example for young, intelligent women on the way to intellectual emancipation. She was clever, she was talented, but she was certainly not emancipated. And to make things worse, she repeatedly came so close to antisemitic declarations that you could even think she might really have had ideas that are not compatible with Germany’s mentality today. But the name Humboldt was supposed to wash away all doubts and scruples. Caroline von Humboldt does not need more than her name to shine over young women researchers and give them the necessary aura!
As you can imagine, I considered it my mission to set things straight (wisdom does not come at age 35, but clearly much later…). Together with (women) colleagues from the university (colleagues involved, either theoretically or pragmatically, in questions of gender equality and women recognition), I organized a one-day symposion on Caroline von Humboldt. The idea was to scrutinize different aspects of her life (her activity as a salonière, as a translator, as a letter writer, as a patron to artists – and not least, her position towards Judaism). For the first time in my life, I gave a paper in front of a room that was so full you could almost not breath. And the press was there: there was a long paper in the Tagesspiegel a few weeks later (see here).
I also initiated the Caroline von Humboldt forum, a blog dedicated to a better understanding of Caroline von Humboldt’s life path, especially in the context of her time, e.g. with a focus on lettered women in Prussia around 1800 (the whole work behind the blog is due to my master’s student Janin Afken – thank you, Janin!). The plan was to publish the papers held at the symposion on this blog, but, as I already mentioned at the Weblog Conference in Munich, I did not count on the reluctance of some authors to see their papers published online (some papers were printed somewhere else). So I present you tonight the papers we could get so far, hoping this will convince the other authors it is worth adding their stone. You can find them here. Writing on women writers is such a delicate issue, whatever the point of view you choose: for this paper, I have been weighing each and every word of each and every sentence sentence. Read it, you’ll see!
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