The scholarly Gotthelf edition, in both its print edition (HKG) - stands for Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe – and digital (dHKG) formats, seeks to facilitate access to the works of Albert Bitzius, the pastor of Lützelflüh, and the popular writer, Jeremias Gotthelf. Our aim is to make his work completely accessible for in-depth study, be that by students, researchers, or the wider circle of an interested general public.
This edition showcases, for the first time, the most comprehensive collection of his complete works: In addition to the initial critical edition of all of his accessible manuscripts, furthermore it introduces, also a novelty, all published material of the poet as they appeared during his lifetime, in his own words. In this way, the edition places emphasis on a historical-discursive contextualization of his work, which engenders a more holistic understanding of the political, pastoral and literary activity of Gotthelf in his time. Conversely, the addition of large annotated commentaries to his well-known novels and lesser known works are included in this edition, enabling access to the various contexts of his time through his work.
The print edition addresses an academic audience by emphasizing a classical philological presentation of the texts. The digital edition, on the other hand, seeks to appeal to a wider audience, whether they are professionals, students, or general readers. The central goal for this digital Gotthelf edition is to offer intuitively comprehensible access into all components of the edition for these mentioned groups. Thus, the edition utilises various extended media platforms for viewing the text presentation in varying ways (reading text, genetic text, text-coding, facsimile).
Furthermore, innovative orientation support, possibility of navigation, and forms of visualisation are tools that have only just begun to be established over the last few years within the framework of digital humanities. This includes time line, calendar, archive folders, context of work, keyword clouds, thematic overviews. We augment these features with intelligent search tools.
The contents of the edition are both interconnected with each other via manifold shortcuts (register, entities, norm data) and linked with external resources that offer additional context information (editions, lexica, dictionaries, data bases).