As term has reached its end, I would like to provide for some orientation in the mind map that seems to have drawn itself over the past months to guide me ahead.
First, to the good news: Sabine Seifert is now working at the Fontane Archive in Potsdam and Melanie Siemund at the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, both in exciting projects with no less exciting perspectives. I really hope to host guest posts by them on this blog when time has come (project presentation, conference report and the like). This will be one step towards enlarging the Berlin focus.
Apart from that, I will be travelling a lot this fall and winter and am very much looking forward to the contacts and exchanges of ideas in Germany, France, Austria and the UK. It always does good to one’s research to be shaken a bit by perspectives from the outside. The reasons for me travelling are: editions (and, yes, digital editions, a lot), textual scholarship, the concept of “the intellectual”, my favorite authors, DH in general. All very good reasons to leave my home desk, really.
But mostly, I will from now on spend time at said home desk working on serious publications (= not blogs). Apart from the articles due this summer, I will be working on a DH volume (in German) that I co-edit with Markus Schnöpf in the context of Berlin DH (planned to be released in September), on a little book extension of my twitter blog (in French) and on a revision of my Vorlesung of this summer term in order to make a correct “qualification” out of it.
I still hope to find topics to blog about that will not be absorbed by these print publications, having my ideas disappear for months in the publication pipeline and lose half of their actuality when they are finally printed…
The digital edition Letters and Texts will still be enriched until December; I especially hope to translate all the text bits by then (introductions, guidelines, biographies). Recently, we have published there an extensive version of our editorial guidelines as well as an edition of Chamissos Peter Schlemihl by Anna Busch. The Boeckh corpora are still being enriched as the dissertations of Sabine Seifert and Julia Doborosky progress, and Johanna Preusse will refine the Tieck letters until Mid-August.
And a book should come and enrich the collection “Berliner Intellektuelle um 1800” that I direct at the Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag: the volume containing (mostly, but not only) the contributions to the conference we organized in November 2013 (the blogposts dedicated to that conference can be found under the category “Briefe+Generation-Tagung”), edited by Selma Jahnke and Sylvie Le Moel, will appear in September. Check for “Briefe um 1800. Zur Medialität von Generation” by then!
