Title: The Humboldt Code: On Creating a Hybrid Digital Scholarly Edition of a 19th Century Globetrotter

Abstract: Most people know something about Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian traveler, naturalist, prolific author and international science celebrity from Berlin. Today, in the year of his 250th anniversary, it is the intellectual heritage of Humboldt’s understanding of humankind and nature in its intrinsic interdependency that continues to motivate new readings of his works and actions. Humboldt's nine hand-written travel journals of his journey to the American Tropics are among the most famous testimonies to this heritage. This paper examines the recent history of their acquisition and presents the publication series edition humboldt. The hybrid (digital, print) edition humboldt prepares critical scholarly editions of Humboldt's travel journals both to the American as well as to the Eurasian hemisphere together with a selection of Humboldt’s unpublished papers and manuscripts, to the most part unknown to the public. After presenting the edition's corpus, the paper shows the ways, in which the complementary approach of edition humboldt combines the strengths of a reader-friendly book edition with those of a digital full-text and facsimile edition based on a carefully curated data infrastructure.

Keywords: Alexander von Humboldt, travel literature, digital scholarly editions, digital humanities, TEI-XML

Author: Tobias Kraft, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Berlin, German.