During the project period of six years, it is planned on the one hand to publish the complete edition of Albrecht von Haller's reviews (including more than 9'000 in the leading German-language review organ Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen) as a central, but still largely unknown part of his oeuvre. On the other hand, a well-founded selection of approximately 8,000 letters related to the content of the reviews will be edited as an interim stage to the longer-term goal of editing Haller's correspondence as a whole, which comprises a total of approximately 17,000 letters.
The digital edition will be carried out on the hallerNet edition and research platform, which was created in cooperation with the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH).
The metadata of about 48'000 publications, 25'000 actors, 20'000 letters, 3'500 places, 2'900 plant species, 1'000 meetings and 850 institutions are linked in a TEI-compliant XML data structure. This allows them to be linked as referenced entities to the edited text content, both on the level of private communication (letters) and on the level of public discourse (reviews). The systematic linking of the two complementary levels of communication is one of the main innovations of the edition project.
The project aims not only at Haller's singular significance, but also at its paradigmatic form, which, thanks to its manifold activities and the large body of preserved material, is ideally suited to analyze central themes, practices and dynamics in the scholarly and enlightened world of the 18th century. Thus a corpus of sources becomes tangible that is particularly stimulating for the currently prosperous fields of research around practices of knowledge, scholarly networks, the development of scientific disciplines in the emerging scientific community, and the history of transfer and interdependence in the 18th century. Furthermore, aspects of the development of genres and types of texts as well as the connection between scholarly and literary forms of communication and publication will become visible.