CorrespSearch–Connect and Search Scholarly Editions of Correspondence

Letters are considered some of the most valuable sources for historical research. Not only does their content cover a variety of different themes, events, persons, etc., but letters also depict networks between people. Yet due to editorial and practical reasons historical letters are generally only partially edited—focusing often only on one person or on the correspondence between two persons. In order to address questions on topics like relationship networks, it is necessary to do elaborate research using multiple editions of letters. With correspSearch you can search through indexes of different letter collections (digital or print) by sender, addressee, location written, location sent, and date. To this purpose a website and a technical interface are provided. Collecting the letter metadata from separate editions and repositories and making the data available through open interfaces, based on the foundations of TEI-XML and under a free license. Through this service the indexes of different digital and print letter editions can be quickly and easily searched.

Scholarly Correspondences Among Orientalists during the Early and Late Modern Period as a Historical Source: A Series of Lectures. The object of this lecture series is to bring together scholars and librarians engaged with collections of correspondences and/or include related projects that use appropriate digital tools to map and analyze such corpora. It is hosted by Sabine Schmidtke (NES@IAS) and María Mercedes Tuya (Digital Scholarship@IAS). For additional information on this event and the lecture series visit: https://albert.ias.edu/20.500.12111/8044.