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	<title>Digital Intellectuals</title>
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	<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org</link>
	<description>A blog accompanying the production of the digital edition &#34;Letters and texts. The intellectual Berlin around 1800&#34; - by Anne Baillot</description>
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		<title>&#8220;Lettres et textes. Le Berlin intellectuel des années 1800&#8243;: une présentation</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/477</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/477#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 11 May 2012 07:11:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Adelbert von Chamisso]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[August Boeckh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Friedrich von Raumer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Karl Solger]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Louis de Beausobre]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ludwig Tieck]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Non classé]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[this edition]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=477</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[L&#8217;édition numérique &#8220;Lettres et textes. Le Berlin intellectuel des années 1800&#8221; 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 &#8220;Les intellectuels berlinois entre 1800 et 1830&#8243;, elle est en fait moins centrée sur le premier tiers du XIXème siècle qu&#8217;il n&#8217;y paraît. L&#8217;objectif scientifique qui constitue la matrice de l&#8217;édition en matière de codage et de mise en page est bien celui du [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>L&#8217;édition numérique &#8220;<a title="Notre edition" href="http://141.20.126.175/berliner-intellektuelle/?language=fr" target="_blank">Lettres et textes. Le Berlin intellectuel des années 1800</a>&#8221; 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 &#8220;Les intellectuels berlinois entre 1800 et 1830&#8243;, elle est en fait moins centrée sur le premier tiers du XIXème siècle qu&#8217;il n&#8217;y paraît.</p>
<p>L&#8217;objectif scientifique qui constitue la matrice de l&#8217;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.</p>
<p>L&#8217;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&#8217;agit ainsi de montrer que les débats littéraires et scientifiques sont toujours aussi des débats politiques, et comment.</p>
<p>Cette question générale s&#8217;articule en quatre ligne directrices, qui se retrouvent dans les corpus choisis:</p>
<p>- quel rôle joue l&#8217;influence de la culture francaise dans la Prusse intellectuelle? C&#8217;est principalement cette question qui a amené à revenir en arrière dans le temps pour intégrer un corpus XVIIIèmiste, sans lequel l&#8217;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&#8217;Adolf von Buch et Louis de Beausobre des années 1760-1770, qui montrent de manière exemplaire les structures de circulation &#8211; francophone &#8211; des savoirs dans la Prusse frédéricienne. De l&#8217;autre côté de la ligne de démarcation &#8220;1800&#8243;, il s&#8217;agit des lettres (allemandes, mais entrelacées de francais) entre Adelbert von Chamisso et Louis de La Foye;</p>
<p>- dans quelle mesure la création de l&#8217;université à Berlin a-t-elle cristallisé et accentué la présence d&#8217;intellectuels sur la scène publique? C&#8217;est d&#8217;abord l&#8217;étude des papiers d&#8217;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&#8217;université et membre de l&#8217;Académie des Sciences. La correspondance de la &#8220;Société du vendredi&#8221;, dont les membres les plus éminents (Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Friedrich von Raumer, Karl Solger) étaient eux aussi professeurs à l&#8217;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&#8217;année 1818 ont ainsi pour but de reconstituer l&#8217;horizon intellectuel ainsi ouvert. Des documents manuscrits relatifs à Immanuel Hermann Fichte devraient venir s&#8217;y ajouter.</p>
<p>- quelle est la marge de manoeuvre des écrivains, hommes et femmes? La question est plus simple à aborder en partant des hommes qu&#8217;en partant des femmes, pour des raisons évidentes de conservation des corpus. Il s&#8217;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&#8217;édition sont d&#8217;une part Ludwig Tieck et d&#8217;autre part Adelbert von Chamisso. Du côté des femmes, c&#8217;est Helmina von Chézy qui devrait prendre place dans l&#8217;édition, mais sous une forme qui n&#8217;est pas encore clairement définie (lettres, textes?).</p>
<p>- bien que plus marginal, le quatrième aspect émerge transversalement dans quasiment tous les corpus; il s&#8217;agit de la réception de l&#8217;Antiquité et de son utilisation à des fins politiques. Les cours de F.A. Wolf, le projet de Boeckh à l&#8217;Académie des Sciences, les traductions du grec auxquelles se livrent la plupart des auteurs que nous éditons, en sont des exemples parlants.</p>
<p>Sa structure et le travail sur la mise en relation entre les différents éléments avec l&#8217;objectif de répondre à ces quatre questions sont à mon sens les points forts de cette édition. Pour l&#8217;heure, son contenu est encore trop léger pour qu&#8217;on puisse vraiment en tirer des conclusions à grande échelle. Il s&#8217;agit donc dans un premier temps d&#8217;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.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Out of the shadow, into the light</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/451</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/451#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 06 May 2012 13:27:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Adelbert von Chamisso]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anna Busch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Selma Jahnke]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[this edition]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=451</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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. &#160; &#160; I realized then how many different ways of looking at [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In 1813, <a title="Chamisso_Bio(english)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelbert_von_Chamisso" target="_blank">Adelbert von Chamisso</a> 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  <a title="Kunersdorfer Musenhof" href="http://www.kunersdorfer-musenhof.de/" target="_blank">Kunersdorfer Musenhof</a>, a house hosting a permanent exhibition dedicated to Chamisso.</p>
<p><a href="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/569/files/2012/05/Kunersdrofer_MusenhofbyMichaelBienert.jpeg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-453" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/569/files/2012/05/Kunersdrofer_MusenhofbyMichaelBienert-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/569/files/2012/05/Generalversammlung_Chamissogesellschaft_2012byMichaelBienert.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-454" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/569/files/2012/05/Generalversammlung_Chamissogesellschaft_2012byMichaelBienert-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="180" height="135" /></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>I realized then how many different ways of looking at Chamisso&#8217;s life and work there can be, how many different ways there are to keep the memory of his achievements vivid.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>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 &#8211; or, for that matter, each and every scholar who  has dealt with the Chamisso corpus &#8211; 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.</p>
<p>I had no idea that there exists no major edition of Chamisso&#8217;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&#8217;s best friends, <a title="HItzig Blog" href="http://juliuseduardhitzig.blogspot.de/" target="_blank">Julius Eduard Hitzig</a>, and she knew the early editions and the situation on the manuscripts&#8217; 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&#8217;s correspondence with his poet friends, among which Chamisso plays a central role. Selma Jahnke came to the group with a dissertation project on <a title="Helmina_bio(engl)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmina_von_Chezy" target="_blank">Helmina von Chézy</a> (gosh, I have to improve that wikipedia bio!), Chamisso&#8217;s lover in the 1810s. As for Helmina, we both knew that her printed work and manuscripts had never been considered as a &#8220;work&#8221; 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.</p>
<p>Both perspectives &#8211; the Hitzig one and the Helmina one &#8211; lead us to look more closely into the Chamisso manuscripts. There was one additional aspect &#8211; not a completely different one as they all are connected, but still another perspective &#8211; 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.</p>
<p>The different team member&#8217;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&#8217;s paper analyzes the common literary work of Chamisso and Helmina in the 1810s; Anna&#8217;s paper deals with the Chamisso biography published by Hitzig after his friend&#8217;s death. Anna also constituted a corpus for our digital edition composed of 3 literary texts  that were kept together in Hitzig&#8217;s papers. One of them is a publisher&#8217;s copy of <em>Peter Schlemihl</em>, which she has been encoding lately and we hope to have online at the end of Summer.</p>
<p>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&#8230; We are editing this corpus together with a master&#8217;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.</p>
<p>In that project, we are working in close cooperation with the <a title="Stiftung Stadtmuseum" href="http://www.stadtmuseum.de/index.php" target="_blank">Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin</a>, the <a title="StaBi_En" href="http://staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/en/" target="_blank">Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK</a>, the <a title="DTA_EN" href="http://www.bbaw.de/en/research/dta" target="_blank">Deutsches Textarchiv</a>, and René-Marc Pille, a French  Chamisso specialist, who will be visiting this week (his conference has been <a href="http://chamisso-forum.blogspot.de/2012/05/die-franzosischen-familienbriefe-im.html" target="_blank">announced on the Chamisso-Forum</a>). And with all these different light spots, Chamisso will certainly have to come into the light &#8211; and then we will see whether it is with a shadow or not.</p>
<p>Thanks to <a title="Michael Bienert" href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/00173067786379818214" target="_blank">Michael Bienert</a> for the pictures (and for<a title="Chamisso Forum annoucing Berlin Intellektuelle" href="http://chamisso-forum.blogspot.de/2012/05/intellektuelles-leben-um-1800-geht.html" target="_blank"> his post on our edition</a>)!</p>
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		<title>Thinking in categories</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/436</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/436#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 May 2012 14:53:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[August Boeckh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Louis de Beausobre]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ludwig Tieck]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[this edition]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=436</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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&#8217;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 [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>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&#8217;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?</p>
<p>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 &#8220;Letters and texts&#8221; 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 &#8211; well, obviously, shares one with Anna and has a whole other one for herself.</p>
<p>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 &#8211; 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.</p>
<p>Should we keep these categories or change them? Should we have clearer categories (letters, texts, lecture notes would be an option for instance)?</p>
<p>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&#8230;). 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&#8217;s <em>Nouvelle Heloise</em> 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&#8230;</p>
<p>So it all comes down to the networks &#8211; 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&#8230;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Herr Sommer und Frau Sonne (macrons forever)</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/423</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/423#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Apr 2012 07:23:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Geminationsstrich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[TEI-P5]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[this edition]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=423</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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&#38; # 772;er (I had to add a few spaces for html to not transform it into an actual macron&#8230;) for Sommer [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>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.</p>
<p>There were all in all two valid options:</p>
<p>- encoding it as a macron in the form: Som&amp; # 772;er (I had to add a few spaces for html to not transform it into an actual macron&#8230;) for Sommer and Son&amp; # 772;e for Sonne;</p>
<p>- encoding it as a glyph in the form: So&lt;g ref=&#8221;#mgem&#8221;/&gt;er for Sommer and So&lt;g ref=&#8221;#ngem&#8221;/&gt; for Sonne</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>So&lt;choice&gt;&lt;abbr&gt;m&amp; # 772;&lt;/abbr&gt;&lt;expan&gt;mm&lt;/expan&gt;&lt;/choice&gt; (or maybe use a &lt;sic&gt;/&lt;corr&gt; combination within the choice element, but it does not make much difference). This would make encoding Geminationsstriche somewhat tedious.</p>
<p>In the second option, it would be possible to define the &#8220;mgem&#8221;/&#8221;ngem&#8221; 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.</p>
<p>So Alexander Meyer came up with the idea that we encode in the &#8220;light&#8221; form Som&amp; # 772;er for Sommer and Son&amp; # 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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		<title>a word for the ladies</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/411</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/411#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:13:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Caroline von Humboldt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Janin Afken]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=411</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Almost a year ago &#8211; 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 [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Almost a year ago &#8211; 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 <a title="CvH award" href="http://www.lens.unifi.it/attachments/CvHP_Aufruf_2011_eng_web.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
<p>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&#8230;), the sun was shining, and thank you Caroline.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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&#8217;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!</p>
<p>As you can imagine, I considered it my mission to set things straight (wisdom does not come at age 35, but clearly much later&#8230;). 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 &#8211; 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<a title="Tagesspigel_ August2011" href="http://www2.hu-berlin.de/carolinevonhumboldt/?p=248" target="_blank"> here</a>).</p>
<p>I also initiated the <a title="CvH-Forum" href="http://www2.hu-berlin.de/carolinevonhumboldt/?page_id=2" target="_blank">Caroline von Humboldt forum</a>, a blog dedicated to a better understanding of Caroline von Humboldt&#8217;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&#8217;s student Janin Afken &#8211; thank you, Janin!). The plan was to publish the papers held at the symposion on this blog, but, as I already mentioned at the <a title="Weblog Conf Munich" href="http://redaktionsblog.hypotheses.org/407" target="_blank">Weblog Conference in Munich</a>, 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 <a title="CvH-Kolloquiumsbeitraege" href="http://www2.hu-berlin.de/carolinevonhumboldt/?p=352" target="_blank">here</a>. 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&#8217;ll see!</p>
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		<title>Mythos and Logos of my Mother Tongue for fr.hypotheses.org</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/396</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/396#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:08:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Non classé]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=396</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Après dix années passées en Allemagne dont quatre intégrée à un département de littérature allemande, je croyais avoir fini par régler avec moi-même l&#8217;usage de mes deux principales langues de communication. Mon allemand professionnel est bien évidemment moins riche que mon francais (désolée, il n&#8217;y a pas de cédilles sur mon clavier allemand), mais il est fait de conventions que je maîtrise suffisamment bien pour faire illusion. Et m&#8217;étant mise aux humanités numériques, j&#8217;avais commencé à réactiver mon anglais, en particulier par l&#8217;intermédiaire de [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Après dix années passées en Allemagne dont quatre intégrée à un département de littérature allemande, je croyais avoir fini par régler avec moi-même l&#8217;usage de mes deux principales langues de communication. Mon allemand professionnel est bien évidemment moins riche que mon francais (désolée, il n&#8217;y a pas de cédilles sur mon clavier allemand), mais il est fait de conventions que je maîtrise suffisamment bien pour faire illusion. Et m&#8217;étant mise aux humanités numériques, j&#8217;avais commencé à réactiver mon anglais, en particulier par l&#8217;intermédiaire de ce blog. Autre sphère de langage, autre vocabulaire, là aussi encore plus pauvre (j&#8217;estime perdre chaque fois un facteur 100 en termes d&#8217;étendue de langage en passant du francais à l&#8217;allemand puis de l&#8217;allemand à l&#8217;anglais); mais autre public aussi: tout cela me semblait tenir la route.</p>
<p>La gêne est venue simultanément de mon projet d&#8217;habilitation et du découpage d&#8217;hypotheses.org en sphères linguistiques et de l&#8217;impression subséquente de me mouvoir dans un no man&#8217;s land linguistique. Du côté de mon habilitation, j&#8217;ai longuement hésité puis décidé de l&#8217;écrire en allemand dans la mesure où c&#8217;est en Allemagne que je souhaite poursuivre ma carrière universitaire. La délimitation stratégique du thème de ce travail, savant mélange de divers facteurs (mon temps de travail disponible, les exigences de l&#8217;institution, et un peu mes envies), m&#8217;a amenée à revenir à des textes théoriques que je lis &#8211; dans leur langue d&#8217;origine autant que faire se peut. En exhumant Foucault et Derrida, tout s&#8217;est compliqué: les traductions allemandes avec lesquelles travaillent mes interlocuteurs allemands sont d&#8217;une complexité terrible puisqu&#8217;elles tentent de rendre compte d&#8217;une part de toutes les strates de sens, d&#8217;autre part de tous les jeux de mots et, dans le cas de Derrida, elles essayent aussi de rendre justice à l&#8217;influence heideggerienne sur la pensée de Derrida et sont en quelque sorte une retraduction de Derrida en allemand heideggerien ou partiellement heideggerien. Ce sont de surcroît &#8211; si on prend par exemple &#8220;Qu&#8217;est-ce qu&#8217;un auteur?&#8221;  &#8211; des textes qui font partie des basiques du cursus littéraire, systématiquement cités dans tout article s&#8217;inquiétant de la légitimité de l&#8217;écrivain, donc difficiles à ignorer.</p>
<p>Je n&#8217;arrivais pas vraiment à formuler la nature de mon insatisfaction linguistique avec mon habilitation, mais elle était bien là. Quand j&#8217;écris en allemand pour parler des choses que j&#8217;y traite (questions du rapport au texte, à l&#8217;archive), c&#8217;est lourdingue, didactique; quand j&#8217;écris en francais, c&#8217;est tout le contraire: pas besoin d&#8217;être didactique, la pensée s&#8217;articule d&#8217;elle-même. Il y a là  une sorte de contradiction dans les termes avec la réalité de la langue scientifique allemande, qui se passe d&#8217;un tas de transitions, annonces, plans compliqués, rhétorique à la noix tels que les requièrent en revanche les standards francais. Comment est-ce qu&#8217;il se fait donc que, là où je pourrais argumenter plus souplement, je n&#8217;y arrive pas?</p>
<p>C&#8217;est ma lecture de Platon d&#8217;aujourd&#8217;hui qui m&#8217;a donné un début de piste. Au fond, ma pensée allemande est une pensée logique et ma pensée francaise une pensée mythologique &#8211; sans doute parce qu&#8217;elle peut se nourrir de tous ces apprentissages maternels, viscéraux, qui définissent mon rapport au texte, à l&#8217;écriture, à la langue. Lorsque j&#8217;écris en francais, les images suffisent, les mots parlent, sans que j&#8217;aie besoin de réfléchir à leur relation, parce que cette relation semble se transmettre directement de mon cerveau au papier. En francais, j&#8217;écris, tandis qu&#8217;en allemand ou en anglais, je produis un texte.</p>
<p>Il ne me reste plus qu&#8217;à accepter cet état de fait. Aussi lourdingue que puisse être mon habilitation en allemand, je pense que, pour mon bien-être mental, mais aussi pour réussir à construire une heuristique qui tienne la route, je gagne à séparer les différents types d&#8217;écriture que sont le travail scientifique d&#8217;un part et toutes les autres formes d&#8217;écriture de l&#8217;autre &#8211; blog, lettre, et ces bribes incompréhensibles  qu&#8217;il y a dans mon cahier muji et dont je reste persuadée que personne ne pourra rien faire, jamais, étant donné leur état brut.</p>
<p>Il me reste encore &#8211; j&#8217;y travaille &#8211; à vraiment comprendre pourquoi j&#8217;écris mon blog en anglais &#8211; et pour qui. Une fois que j&#8217;aurai compris ca, j&#8217;arrêterai sans doute de vouloir que ce soit la rédaction d&#8217;hypotheses.org qui réponde à cette question à ma place en me disant dans quel tiroir je dois me ranger.</p>
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		<title>That&#8217;s what I call Digital Intellectuals!</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/392</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/392#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:54:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Berlin Academy of Sciences]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Louis de Beausobre]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Personendatenrepositorium-BBAW]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=392</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Berlin Academy of Sciences just launched a digital edition of the minutes of the work sessions that were held there between 1746 and 1786. You can consult it here: it is awesome. Not just because it looks awesome (great design, intuitive orientation, no information overload), but also because it is an actually well conceived resource &#8211; and a totally helpful one for my further work too. The originals are in French (French became the official language at the Academy under Frederick 2nd and [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The Berlin Academy of Sciences just launched a digital edition of the minutes of the work sessions that were held there between 1746 and 1786. You can consult it <a title="Registres de l'Academie" href="http://akademieregistres.bbaw.de/index.html" target="_blank">here</a>: it is awesome. Not just because it looks awesome (great design, intuitive orientation, no information overload), but also because it is an actually well conceived resource &#8211; and a totally helpful one for my further work too.</p>
<p>The originals are in French (French became the official language at the Academy under Frederick 2nd and remained it until 1810), but you can find a selection of German translations. You can search either through the minutes (&#8220;Protokolle&#8221;, chronologically ordered) or through the papers presented at the Academy (&#8220;Akademie-Schriften&#8221;) or by looking for occurrences of a person (&#8220;Personen&#8221;). I was thrilled to see that my guy Beausobre (see <a title="How critical " href="http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/176" target="_blank">this post</a> on Beausobre) appears 912 times and am looking forward to cross-reference the occurrences with the periods for which I have letters waiting to be read. I so  like it when you find out that the official version of an information is presented in a radically different way in private writings.</p>
<p>The only thing that I think could significantly improve the edition would be a more precise work on the biographies. At the time being, they are pretty scarce. Hopefully those good people writing minutes and attending sessions at the Academy will at some point be integrated in the database of the Personendatenrepositorium. This is also a project of the Academy of Sciences and it aims at bringing together the biographical data emanating from the different Academy projects. One could argue that the PDR has a focus on 19th century and already a lot to do with just one century. But 1760 is really almost the 19th century, if you consider the major turn Berlin took with Frederick 2nd as the beginning of an intellectual era in Berlin (like I do).</p>
<p>It somehow confirms a kind of aporia I have been discussing with Claudia Sedlarz of the Berliner Klassik last Monday:  even if your aim is to seize network effects or connections, it all comes up in the end to the way in which you will be able to connect biographies. You always need a few &#8220;lighthouse&#8221; persons in your research horizon, like orientation marks, in order to be able to shed any light at all. And with that, you are either stuck in the canon or constituting your own canon. Either way, as soon as you are moving in the field of biographies, a block of normativity falls on your shoulders. But you can&#8217;t properly operate without it. Sound like Sisyphus to me&#8230;</p>
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		<title>The next step</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/383</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/383#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 15 Apr 2012 13:39:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[this edition]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=383</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In one of my favorite movies (&#8220;Ma saison préférée&#8221;, by André Téchiné, with Catherine Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil), one of the characters says at some point: The problem is not the wrong step, it is the step after. I find this assertion to be true in all kinds of circumstances. The ability to think the next step, to implement the right corrective at the right time and in the right place, is probably just as important as the ability to achieve and finish something. [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In one of my favorite movies (&#8220;Ma saison préférée&#8221;, by André Téchiné, with Catherine Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil), one of the characters says at some point: The problem is not the wrong step, it is the step after. I find this assertion to be true in all kinds of circumstances. The ability to think the next step, to implement the right corrective at the right time and in the right place, is probably just as important as the ability to achieve and finish something.</p>
<p>I knew very well that the digital edition was everything but finished when I posted the link, but the fact that it is now officially online has allowed my priorities to finally restructurate. I am not obsessed with line breaks any more (what a relief!), but more able to think in terms of what would be the most coherent next step now. I see four main aspects:</p>
<p>* <strong>data enrichment</strong>: I am not sure at this point whether it would be more clever to first &#8220;finish&#8221; a corpus or to first add contents to categories of corpora that are, for the time being, empty. We will try to work on both in parallel. Since this part of the work can be divided in small and coherent work packages, I think it will be doable.</p>
<p>* <strong>looks</strong>: finally people have started to dare tell me what they think of the looks of the page. The fact that we did a good job does not mean that the result looks good. It is more complicated to change things there though.  I don&#8217;t want to lose the intuitive and economical general looks on the one hand, the reading comfort on the other hand. But I don&#8217;t have 5000 Euro to pay a professional to do the job to realize something in the style of the <a title="Van Gogh Letters" href="http://vangoghletters.org/vg/" target="_blank">Van Gogh Letters</a> (a site that still has too many categories in my eyes). I really wish there were something like wordpress for digital editions&#8230;</p>
<p>* <strong>hosting and data architecture</strong>: for the time being, the scans are all stocked on our server at the University. This means that we don&#8217;t have yet the option of offering different resolutions for the pictures. It also means that our whole data architecture is a temporary one. We really need to move on on the different workflows there! How will we even bring everything together: the letters, the work manuscripts and their comparison with the first print, the data concerning the persons, the connection to the archives, the connection to the documents (especially the Boeckh documents) for which we only have metadata at the moment (but for that matter, a lot of them!)?</p>
<p>* <strong>search engine</strong>: what we have online now corresponds to the structure of our data. You can search the index or you can search the text (full-text) including or not including the metadata. Although I know what I would like to reach in the end, I am still not able to formulate it in a way that the people in my team are able to understand it and implement it in the search engine. Especially my idea that, in order to be able to analyze phenomenons of genesis and reception of a literary or scholarly event, you have to isolate a particular period of time (say, 2 months) in the corpus and combine it with some keywords, seems to be completely over the moon.</p>
<p>So the next step for the time being is still to think about the next step. And to conclude that my favorite season is definitely not spring (especially when you get snowfalls on Easter day), but more fall &#8211; and in the fall, we will be, hopefully, three or four steps ahead&#8230;</p>
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		<title>Berlin + around 1800 + ???</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/379</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/379#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:23:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Berlin Academy of Sciences]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[this edition]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=379</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I was invited &#8211; together with a hundred other elected guests &#8211; to an inofficial birthday party at the Academy of Sciences yesterday. As chance would have it, the presentation of the project &#8220;Berliner Klassik&#8221; happened to take place on the 75th birthday of its director Conrad Wiedemann. The whole presentation was called &#8220;Wie die Klassik nach Berlin kam&#8221; (roughly translated &#8220;How classicism came to Berlin&#8221;, although I am not sure that this really renders the different meaning layers of the word &#8220;Klassik&#8221;). Two [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I was invited &#8211; together with a hundred other elected guests &#8211; to an inofficial birthday party at the Academy of Sciences yesterday. As chance would have it, the presentation of the project &#8220;Berliner Klassik&#8221; happened to take place on the 75th birthday of its director Conrad Wiedemann. The whole presentation was called &#8220;Wie die Klassik nach Berlin kam&#8221; (roughly translated &#8220;How classicism came to Berlin&#8221;, although I am not sure that this really renders the different meaning layers of the word &#8220;Klassik&#8221;). Two longer talks, lots of great music (vocal and flute), a project presentation by the people who have made the &#8220;Berliner Klassik&#8221; in the last 10 years and a small speech by Conrad Wiedemann filled the evening.</p>
<p>It striked me how little Berlin there was to all that. Of course, the presentation of the &#8220;Berliner Klassik&#8221; was Berlin-centered. It was in fact a splendid moment of science, articulating cultural and literary history on a basis of a sketch drawn by <a title="E.T.A. Hoffmann" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._T._A._Hoffmann" target="_blank">E.T.A. Hoffmann</a> (&#8220;Der Kunz&#8217;sche Riss&#8221;) on which he represented the Gendarmenmarkt, its monuments, and the streets nearby, peopled with winehandlers, playwrights, and even characters from his books. But this concentration on Berlin&#8217;s most beautiful square was more the exception than the rule on that evening, which I cannot help but wonder about. What is it about Berlin that you cannot really grab it?</p>
<p>In his thesis, Conrad Wiedemann is certainly more radical than me. He thinks that Germans  have shown throughout their history a reluctance to admit that Berlin is special, that it is the center. I would not extend my analysis beyond the period of time I actually know, this hard-to-define &#8220;around 1800&#8243; which includes late Aufklärung, early romanticism, high romanticism, German idealism and whatnot (here I should list the institutions that contributed to it too, but I will let you read the<a title="Berliner Klassik" href="http://www.berliner-klassik.de/" target="_blank"> page of the Berliner Klassik</a> instead). Why add some &#8220;Klassik&#8221; on top of all these -isms? The &#8220;Klassik&#8221; is there to make the point that all these different tendencies converged, and they converged to Berlin.</p>
<p>My position is less radical than his since I only defend the idea that the situation in Berlin was a singular one at that time. I tend to avoid comparisons (like the one with Weimar, a place that is historically and literary connected to the idea of &#8220;Klassik&#8221;) by saying it is not really comparable with other constellations. That might be cowardice from me. Or ignorance of how it was elsewhere. I grant you that: I am far from being able to overlook all that. Plus, I am not a historian, which makes me feel like I will never, ever be able to theorize on this kind of scales.</p>
<p>But still. The fact that Conrad Wiedemann mentioned my project as one of those that are evolving as a development from the Berliner Klassik was a great recognition gesture to me (and helped me with that confidence issue I have had lately&#8230;). Interestingly, he underlined the fact that I operate with other concepts than he does, especially those of &#8220;networks&#8221; on the one hand and of &#8220;intellectuals&#8221; on the other hand &#8211; saying something like &#8220;it is ok, it is a new generation and they operate with their own, new categories&#8221;. I think that it is true that mentalities have changed in the past ten years. It is not just me, it is the whole scholarly context. In the field of research itself, the inhibitions to work on Berlin, on the time &#8220;around 1800&#8243; and the Napoleonian Wars while knowing perfectly that this is the birth of national spirit in Germany with all the further consequences it will have, have lowered greatly. Those inhibitions are still there, of course. But the fact that somebody like me gets to be generously funded to check if the two concepts &#8220;intellectual&#8221; and &#8220;network&#8221; allow to understand the phenomenon &#8220;Berlin around 1800&#8243; somwehat better, shows that the question is, at least, considered an interesting one, one that has to be asked.</p>
<p>So let&#8217;s ask it again: What is it about Berlin around 1800? &#8211; and hope that the network analysis will gain another dimension through our digital edition&#8230;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Denial, Anger and &#8211; Resignation</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/368</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/368#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:40:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Non classé]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[this edition]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=368</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I was curious to see how preparing a digital edition compares to preparing a book. The fact that the format is open, that you can always correct and add, should make things more relaxed. Maybe because I am still mentally stuck in the book format though, I could not really let go. Something inside me had conceived a precise idea of the minimal requirement. Though not consciously formulated, it kept  haunting me: I cannot post the link until&#8230; until enough text is there, until [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I was curious to see how preparing a digital edition compares to preparing a book. The fact that the format is open, that you can always correct and add, should make things more relaxed. Maybe because I am still mentally stuck in the book format though, I could not really let go.</p>
<p>Something inside me had conceived a precise idea of the minimal requirement. Though not consciously formulated, it kept  haunting me: I cannot post the link until&#8230; until enough text is there, until I have made sure that I did not forget a single line break because it looks stupid, until all footnotes are at the right place, until the favicon looks good&#8230; I realized that I had developed a sort of to-do list which, although different from the one I have when it comes to books, was just as annoying in terms of perfectionism. Surprisingly enough, I accepted to put online texts I knew I had not transcribed correctly, but did not want them to &#8220;look stupid&#8221; because of a missing line break. What sense does that make? Does it make sense at all?</p>
<p>Just like for a book, this mental check-list turned the last sprint into a kind of mourning process. I had to give up perfection, which is, every time, a painful process (I suppose I take some masochistic pleasure in it though, considering how often I repeat the experience). I questioned everything I do, I questioned the way I do it, I could no see the meaning of what I am doing any more. It seemed to me like there was no perspectives in all of that. Like I was fighting for blanks at the right place when, in the big picture, it should not matter. Or does it?</p>
<p>Like when preparing a book, all interaction with the real world turned into pain. I just wanted to sit at my desk instead of planning further projects which, my subconscious told me, would &#8211; again &#8211; drive me away from perfection. But they gave me human measure for things, and that saved me from drowning completely.</p>
<p>I wanted to observe the process too, which is why I authorized myself the two last blog posts. I knew there were psychological mechanisms at work I wanted to be able to look back at as being part of the genesis of this edition. It was clear that these posts would be, in tone and content, different from the others. That they would be irritating. But I wanted to formulate them and not keep them as an interior black hole like the finish of my PhD thesis still feels to me.</p>
<p>I would like to thank here all the people who made this edition &#8211; which, although imperfect, still took a good start!</p>
<p>Believe it or not: here is the link:<a title="Edition Berliner Intellektuelle" href="http://141.20.126.175/berliner-intellektuelle/?language=de" target="_blank"> http://141.20.126.175/berliner-intellektuelle/</a></p>
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		<title>Can you keep a secret?</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/352</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/352#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Apr 2012 09:53:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Anna Busch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ludwig Tieck]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Non classé]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[this edition]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=352</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[OK, I still haven&#8217;t posted the link to the edition. Actually, I intend to polish the Tieck letters (and wrap up the few missing ones) tomorrow. The postponing only extends to tomorrow evening. The fact that the University is empty and nobody seems to be around (ever heard about Easter break in Germany? fairly comparable to Christmas break&#8230;) has not been a great incentive to hurry up. Anyway. If you have been following this blog carefully, you will have noticed that there is a [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>OK, I still haven&#8217;t posted the link to the edition. Actually, I intend to polish the Tieck letters (and wrap up the few missing ones) tomorrow. The postponing only extends to tomorrow evening. The fact that the University is empty and nobody seems to be around (ever heard about Easter break in Germany? fairly comparable to Christmas break&#8230;) has not been a great incentive to hurry up. Anyway.</p>
<p>If you have been following this blog carefully, you will have noticed that there is a corpus I never ever posted on. I mentioned in my last post the difficulties raised by the &#8220;canonical&#8221; work manuscripts and it seems to be time to introduce the big work manuscripts of the edition now.</p>
<p>It is in many ways a grateful job to dig out in archives papers nobody really knows about. You are being given, as the person who found the jewel, to expose it for the first time, showing what matters most to you, be it its shape, its seize, its reflections, its harmony&#8230;  This jeweler job is the encoding. While encoding, you emphasize one aspect or another: the work process, the connection to other works, the connection to other persons, etc. As the first editor, you get to pick the kind of light that has to be shed on the corpus. Everybody can interpret it in their way in a second step, for sure. But the first encoding is a first interpretation: this right you have as an editor is, in today&#8217;s world, still something you can take for granted when it comes to secondary authors. When you edit a writer nobody knows, you are expected to explain what its interest lays in.</p>
<p>Things are different when it comes to big authors who have already been interpreted for ages. You can&#8217;t edit Goethe in any other way than by scrutinizing each ink mark: not only might it mean something, but it has to be something meaningful. These are corpora with which it is not really possible to experiment around. It is some kind of unspoken rule that you cannot just do whatever you want with Goethe. Especially since there are armies of specialists working on it, big projects it is easy to learn about with the minimal effort of basic googling.</p>
<p>How to situate the pretty-big-but-not-so-great-that-they-have-been-edited-through-and-through authors in the big picture? The difficulty is not just to know what you should feel yourself authorized to do with it, but how to know who else might be working on the corpora and with which research interest. It should not be the job of the archivists to deal with that, but on the other hand, they are the ones that are likely to be confronted with the visits of several researchers wanting to work on the same or on similar corpora. The only thing you can expect from them is to let the different researchers know about each other.</p>
<p>From this point on, the researchers should be able to constitute work groups, to create dynamical and collaborative work environments, where all those who work on a corpus can contribute and share information. Why this only happens in the rarest cases is a mystery to me, and something that makes me at times way too angry.</p>
<p>In that sense, let it be a mystery to nobody that we will edit E.T.A. Hoffmann&#8217;s <em>Sandmann</em> (already online), Chamisso&#8217;s <em>Peter Schlemihl</em> (this summer) and Fouque&#8217;s <em>Undine</em> (over winter) following the manuscripts that can be found in the Hitzig papers at the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin. And that we hope for collaborations.</p>
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		<title>CC-BY (bye-bye, sissy!)</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/341</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/341#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:31:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Personendatenrepositorium-BBAW]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=341</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[No joke today: I plan to publish the link to the edition tomorrow. We could still postpone for a while, but right now, what we mostly need is users&#8217; feedback. Even if I have not prepared (by far) as many letters as I wanted to, the few I have prepared have already allowed me to broaden noticeably the scholarly horizon of the &#8220;intellectual networks&#8221; that are at the core of the edition. The unexpected boom of the index of persons has made me develop [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>No joke today: I plan to publish the link to the edition tomorrow. We could still postpone for a while, but right now, what we mostly need is users&#8217; feedback. Even if I have not prepared (by far) as many letters as I wanted to, the few I have prepared have already allowed me to broaden noticeably the scholarly horizon of the &#8220;intellectual networks&#8221; that are at the core of the edition. The unexpected boom of the index of persons has made me develop new questions on that topic: How can we explain the hierarchy in the historical recognition of some categories of persons vs. the non-recognition of some others? To what extent does it have to do with politics or with communication strategies, how does it relate to the constitution of a historical and/or literary canon? What would be an appropriate way to represent the position women took in those networks despite the lack of information we have on them, how can we gather such information? Why is it so hard to gain information on publishers, even though their names and the works they published are so well known? I hope that the cooperation with the <a title="PDR" href="http://pdr.bbaw.de/" target="_blank">PDR</a> will help me structure this over the spring and summer.</p>
<p>One thing that had to be decided before going online was the license under which we will publish the work. We finally settled on a non commercial CC-BY. Since I had not really intended at first the &#8220;non commercial&#8221; part, let me tell you how it came to it.</p>
<p>The way I put things &#8220;out there&#8221; on the internet feels to me at some extent like recklessness. I don&#8217;t particularly trust human nature; I am certainly exposing myself to distortions of my work. I accept it for myself (like I do in this blog): I consider that there is a certain solidity to the contents I publish which is, to my eyes, sufficient to make it intellectually self-sustainable. Even if someone abuses the contents I put online, re-uses them under his or her name, I am confident enough that the right people will know what is actually my work.</p>
<p>It turned out that for the younger people in my team, they see things quite differently. It has to do with the fact that they are less established scholars than I am on the one hand, and with the corpora we edit on the other hand. While I go with obscure correspondences or lecture notes, they happen to be the ones that are responsible for the &#8220;big authors&#8221; in the edition: they are the ones who publish major literary works after the manuscript, like it has (for some) never been done before. As for me, I only considered it a great chance for them to be the first ones to do so. It did not occur to me that &#8211; because these works belong to the canon &#8211; it would expose them to plagiarism or denial of the work done. This is how we settled on the non commercial license: even if their work is bound to be subject to criticism (which we will thankfully be able to integrate through updates &#8211; this medium is so great, really), at least nobody should be able to earn money with it.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t actually believe it will change much. But if it gives them the feeling that their work is more protected, why not. The problem is, your work is never protected, it is always a risk, an exposure, a hope for a dreamed audience that can just as much turn into a nightmare. And yet: so few things are as enjoyable as putting a message in a bottle. Go figure&#8230;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Setting experiments</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/338</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/338#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Mar 2012 19:27:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Christof Schöch]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=338</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I love saying I am doing experiments. It sounds so serious, so mature, so not like writing complicated (and maybe absurd) theories on letters as paradigms for literary texts as pieces of paper that always miss their destination like I did this afternoon&#8230; Here is what the experiment consists in, for a sober evening (with Simon and Garfunkel cheering me up though). The aim is to figure out how legitimization mechanisms in Wikipedia biographies work. We (Christof and I) divided this one question in the following [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I love saying I am doing experiments. It sounds so serious, so mature, so not like writing complicated (and maybe absurd) theories on letters as paradigms for literary texts as pieces of paper that always miss their destination like I did this afternoon&#8230;</p>
<p>Here is what the experiment consists in, for a sober evening (with Simon and Garfunkel cheering me up though).</p>
<p>The aim is to figure out how legitimization mechanisms in Wikipedia biographies work. We (Christof and I) divided this one question in the following ones:</p>
<p>1) How much weighs scholarly reputation?</p>
<p>2) Is a manuscript proof worth as much as a printed source?</p>
<p>3) Are those legitimization mechanisms different from one country to another?</p>
<p>4) To what extent do those mechanisms contribute to / rely on an existing canon?</p>
<p>Accordingly, I will tonight work on wikipedia biographies:</p>
<p>1) Under my actual name and under a pseudonym;</p>
<p>2) With reference to manuscripts only I know, reference to obscure publications, reference to well known publications;</p>
<p>3) On German, French and English articles (in the three languages for each person I write a bio on);</p>
<p>4) On people quite well known, on people known a little bit, on people only I know (which should not be a problem thanks to my 200 entries in the index of persons)</p>
<p>Wish me luck! I promise to tell you how it turns out in a couple of weeks (and only to put things I know that are true on wikipedia)</p>
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		<title>Word of the Day: Workflow</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/330</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/330#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:59:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Cooperation partners]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laurent Romary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=330</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I started noticing the recurrence of the word &#8220;worklflow&#8221; about a year ago. This is also the time that I had begun to get what metadata are (I come from a galaxy far, far away, as you see). At first, I imagined a nice little boat gently floating  on a river: me and my team along the workflow. I took me a while to accept that the problems of workflow involve thinking in terms of non-linearity and arrhythmia. In the traditional way my discipline works, [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I started noticing the recurrence of the word &#8220;worklflow&#8221; about a year ago. This is also the time that I had begun to get what metadata are (I come from a galaxy far, far away, as you see). At first, I imagined a nice little boat gently floating  on a river: me and my team along the workflow. I took me a while to accept that the problems of workflow involve thinking in terms of non-linearity and arrhythmia.</p>
<p>In the traditional way my discipline works, the most you have to coordinate is topics for papers when you plan a conference or exchanging corrections between the author and the editor for a book. The idea to work in direct connection with institutions and not just shake hands and put their names as &#8220;cooperation partners&#8221; completely changed the way I do my job. Half of it is, in fact, another job.</p>
<p>At the time being, our cooperation extends to 5 institutions we are working out a workflow with:</p>
<p>- the easiest workflow to implement so far &#8211; and also the only institution we already have a signed Memorandum of Understanding with &#8211; was with the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin. We received their digitizations and used them on our edition; anyone wanting to re-use them has to ask for their permission; it is all settled and implemented on the edition page (which I promise you will get to see at the beginning of April)</p>
<p>- the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK: the simple idea to implement in our digital edition a link to the digitizations hosted in the StaBi&#8217;s digital library involves a series of work steps before it comes to actually realizing this linking. We are now working on that specific workflow, which supposes a mutual effort in coordinating the granularity of information we put in the metadata (which both the StaBi and us want to use). Slowly but surely, I am getting acquainted with librarian data formats;</p>
<p>- Some of the texts we edit are major works of German Romanticism, so that the comparison between the manuscript and the first print is a major scholarly issue. In order to realize that, we are working on a workflow with the <a title="DTA" href="http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/" target="_blank">DTA</a> (Deutsches Textarchiv, at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften). The ball is in our camp right now, we have to realize a document that will be comparable to their document. It is not so easy since it does not just concern local amendments, but for instance whole paragraphs missing in one version &#8211; and the ending of the text is completely different, too;</p>
<p>- For the letters, I have emphasized often enough how important the index of persons is to me, especially with the aim of reconstructing intellectual networks. We are working out &#8211; guess what: yes, a workflow! &#8211; with the <a title="PDR" href="http://pdr.bbaw.de/" target="_blank">PDR </a>(Personendatenrepositorium, also Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften) in order to retrieve some information from their database and for them to be able to use some of the specific information we provide through the unedited manuscripts;</p>
<p>- Within the Boeckh project, the cooperation with the University Library is a key element. Like for the StaBi, we have to find a way to mutually enrich our metadata. Unlike with the Staatsbibliothek though, it is not a limited number of folios we have as a common ground but thousands of books to be digitized. The difference of scale involves &#8211; well, a different kind of workflow. I am a little bit overwhelmed by the figures on that part of the project, I must admit. But we still have some time to figure it all out properly.</p>
<p>I hope to come to concrete cooperations like those also with the Archive of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the University of Chicago Library / Special Collections. And hopefully others too. At some point.</p>
<p>One thing that I can say for sure is that I am very happy and proud of the way we use XML. The fact that we, the editorial team, the people who transcribe, comment, write papers on the literary value of those texts, encode them directly in XML/TEI makes it easier to put up all those cooperations. In fact, it makes it simply possible to work out direct workflows. That is one decision I will never thank Laurent enough for.</p>
<p>My biggest worry is still, of course, the long time archiving. On that point too, I think working in XML/TEI will be a major strength of the project. Still, I get more and more the question from the cooperation partners: &#8220;and how long does the project funding still last?&#8221;. June 2015 is coming closer, especially considering the time it will take to implement those workflows. But never would I have dreamed to be able to go that far in these 5 years, and I keep my fingers crossed that I will be given to pursue this work after this funding phase.</p>
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		<title>What&#8217;s in a Boeckh?</title>
		<link>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/322</link>
		<comments>http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/322#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 11 Mar 2012 15:03:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Anne Baillot</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[August Boeckh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laurent Romary]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/?p=322</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I have already mentioned August Boeckh several times in the past (here, here and here for instance), but never presented the importance of the Boeckh part in the big picture of my project. Since we will have a team meeting in a couple of days, this seems to be a good time for a recapitulation on the workflow and the objectives. First, let me tell you how I came to working on August Boeckh! When I developed my project on Berlin intellectuals around 1800, I thought [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I have already mentioned August Boeckh several times in the past (<a title="Handschriftliches und Digitales" href="http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/28" target="_blank">here</a>, <a title="Patching Part One" href="http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/82" target="_blank">here</a> and <a title="Materiality on a scooter" href="http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/193" target="_blank">here</a> for instance), but never presented the importance of the Boeckh part in the big picture of my project. Since we will have a team meeting in a couple of days, this seems to be a good time for a recapitulation on the workflow and the objectives.</p>
<p>First, let me tell you how I came to working on August Boeckh! When I developed my project on Berlin intellectuals around 1800, I thought that there was nothing new to find on the &#8220;big&#8221; intellectuals in the archives, nothing unknown to edit and possibly not so many new, clever ways of working on printed material without repeating what had already been said. I would still argue that when it comes to Fichte, Hegel, Humboldt, which are personae I avoid working on frontally. But at some point, I had to re-ask myself what is a &#8220;big&#8221; and what is a &#8220;small&#8221; intellectual, since there are obviously some in-between categories, some &#8220;mediumly important&#8221; intellectuals whose life and work were not as much over-explored as I had first thought. August Boeckh and his papers happened to be an almost completely unexplored territory.</p>
<p>August Boeckh belongs to the generation of young scholars that built up the Berlin University. Wilhelm von Humboldt had by far not done all the work that was necessary for the University to be a stable academic environment when he left his ministry. It is in the years between 1811 and 1820, the so-called &#8220;Gründerjahre&#8221;, that the relations between the faculties were clarified (the first status had planned an explicit hierarchy that put the Philosophical Faculty in the last place), the way to react to structural aporias like a conflict between University Senate and University Rector was settled, a University Library was organized, etc., etc. August Boeckh came to Berlin in 1811 and stayed there until his death in the 1860s. He served the University and the Academy of Science, was in contact with all major Academies in Europe, started the first Academy Project (a project still running by the way) on Greek inscriptions. He was Professor of Philology, but his activities inside the University extended to being officially appointed at giving all official speeches (first in Latin, then in German) and to leading the Philological Seminary, which he founded and directed until his death. He was a central part of the intellectual puzzle I am trying to reconstruct, at the intersection of politics (see the contents of his speeches), science policy (see his relationships with Alexander von Humboldt), University structure (he was dean and rector several times) and training the elite that made 19th century Germany.</p>
<p>Needless to say, he was a major figure in Classical Philology, so his printed work is solidly known, it was printed and re-printed. But there remains much to learn about his work at the University and at the Academy of Sciences. This is the dissertation topic I suggested to Sabine Seifert when I hired her to work in the group and that she has been exploring for a year and half now. Before I had that funding, I had been working with three other persons from the Humboldt University trying to figure out where to begin, how to proceed: Thomas Poiss, a Hellenist who had already published on that topic, Colin King, a Philosopher working for the August-Boeckh Antikezentrum and Christiane Hackel, a Historian who had worked on Droysen&#8217;s reception of Boeckh in her Masters thesis.</p>
<p>We are now working in three directions:</p>
<p>1) <strong>August Boeckh papers</strong>: in cooperation with the Berlin archives who hold manuscripts by Boeckh, we are putting together an overview of what there is left. The decision to begin with the Berlin manuscripts is a pragmatical one; of course, it should extend to all manuscripts in a further step. As much as I think it will be doable on a national scale, I am afraid it will become more complicated when we include all lecture notes from his classes, since he gave a lot of them, with a lot of public, and this kind of manuscripts are mostly to be found in the USA. The core of the workflow on this part of the project is really the coordination with the institutions. The idea is to work in XML in order to make the data exportable to the<a title="Kalliope Database" href="http://kalliope.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/" target="_blank"> kalliope database </a>and likely to be enriched in both directions (us getting info from kalliope, kalliope getting info from us). We have a whole bunch of datasets now (thanks to the funding of the De Gruyter Stiftung that allowed us to hire Julia Doborosky to do most of that work &#8211; I paid another big part of it with my Caroline von Humboldt award money, it seemed only fair&#8230;).</p>
<p>2) <strong>August Boeckh book collection</strong>: I explained <a title="University Libraries" href="http://digitalintellectuals.hypotheses.org/268" target="_blank">here</a> how the University Library of the Berlin University was born and how long it took before it became part of the University overall concept. Boeckh knew very well how important the University Library is for the institution. He donated all his books to the University Library after his death. Those books (very few of them were kept by the family) were then added to the existing stock without being systematically recorded. Some have an ex-libris, some do not. Some were listed by Boeckh on the handwritten catalogue he also donated, half of them were not. Boeckh&#8217;s list contains about 6000 items. Until now, we moved on two fronts in parallel: one is an XML/TEI information on each entry of Boeckh&#8217;s catalogue (identifiying the book, the edition, the volume, and then trying to find the corresponding volume in the University Library). The other is a less exhaustive list of books that can be identified on the basis of the ex-libris catalogue. We will have to merge these two at some point. The cooperation with the University Library Laurent and I have been working out a couple of weeks ago consists like in point 1) in putting up a workflow that allows mutual data enrichment. The final aim is a digitization program that will allow to virtually reconstruct Boeckh&#8217;s library (with the big advantage that his own books contain his personal remarks and notes in the margins&#8230;). One of the inputs I am expecting from this part of the project is insight in the mechanisms of reception and genesis: Which works of Classical Literature did Boeckh use? How differently could he refer to a source depending on the output he was planning to reach?  Combined with the lecture notes I evoked in point 1), one question that fascinates me is to what extent he would use his sources differently in his lectures and in his published works, where the censorship mechanisms, the public are not the same.</p>
<p>Which takes us to:</p>
<p>3) <strong>the edition of Boeck&#8217;s Enzyklopädie oder Methodologie der Philologischen Wissenschaften</strong>: this is a class Boeckh gave 26 times within 56 years, always based on the same handwritten set of notes. The first draft dates back to 1809 and Boeckh kept enriching it afterwards. The only existing edition of it was realized in the late 19th century by a student of his who wanted to render the totality of Boeckh&#8217;s thought, so that there is no trace  of the genesis of the work to be found there. The original manuscript of that very set of notes is held by the Archive of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and a first transcription reconstructing the different moments of the genesis of the work has been realized in the 1980s, without being finished or published. What we want to do is start from there to realize a hybrid edition (digital in XML/TEI + paper) offering the possibility to collate (is that the right word for &#8220;kollationieren&#8221;?) the different text versions. We are working on the funding application right now, which is why we will be meeting on tuesday&#8230;</p>
<p>And as for myself, one of the very interesting questions I am working on for this summer is in which form or how to include all this material in the exist-database and present it together with the digital edition.</p>
<p>If you want to read the most recent publications on this:</p>
<p>* Romy Werther published an edition of the correspondence between August Boeckh and Alexander von Humboldt.</p>
<p>* Thomas Poiss published a paper dealing among other things with Boeckh&#8217;s speeches in my volume <em>Netzwerke des Wissens. Das intellektuelle Berlin um 1800</em></p>
<p>&#8230; and contact me if you want more!</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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