Designed as a multistage process, the project aims to establish a cooperative network, create a representative digital collection of letter data and texts, and build a portal for the “German” letter in the 18th century. The selected letters from the given time period were written in or sent to the German-speaking world and will be made accessible in the form of metadata, images, and full texts. The selection also includes letters sent from the German-speaking world to correspondents outside of it, as well as letters sent from non-German-speaking areas to recipients in the German-speaking world. The corpus has the potential to include all languages, although German, Latin, and French will predominate.
The goal is to create a reliable corpus and dataset which, by integrating the data that are scattered and have not previously been homogenized, will equip the research community with a reliable data foundation that is reliable also in terms of its size. The project intends to draw on existing infrastructures to develop a comprehensive data collection and information portal for a participatory letter reference system that supports the digitally working humanities by providing metadata and full texts in accordance with the FAIR principles and open access.
