Annemarie Schwarzenbach: Digitale Edition der Kleinen Formen und Briefe

Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908–1942) is one of the most important Swiss authors of the 20th century. She left behind a fascinating body of work consisting of literary long and short forms, journalistic works, and photographs. Today, this work is highly relevant from various perspectives, but it is not fully accessible in its entirety. The SNF project fills important editorial gaps and explores related aspects of her work.

The project makes previously scattered or unpublished texts and letters accessible in a digital edition, taking into account the photographs, and presents them within the social, cultural, and political context of the author and her time. The edition includes the approximately 510 known short forms (i.e., shorter texts such as stories, reports, and essays) as well as all of the approximately 600 known letters. Previously unknown texts that emerge during the research will continuously be added to the editorial corpus.

Project website and emerging edition: https://annemarie-schwarzenbach.ch/

• Transkribus for automatic text recognition and definition/marking of text regions in PAGE-XML
• Script-based data export (Transkribus API) and data transformation into TEI/XML format similar to DTA Bf; continuous version control in Git
• Geovistory for managing registry data (named entities) as a linked open data pool
• oXygen XML Editor with Geovistory integration for content annotation and commenting
• Pivot format between TEI/XML and HTML (abstract syntax tree or lightweight TEI-ODD); server-side indexing/search engine (TBD)
• SvelteKit & Svelte as a modern frontend framework
• Github Projects for technical project management
• IIIF server and DOI/ARK resolver in collaboration with the University Library of Bern

The edition provides the annotated texts of Annemarie Schwarzenbach as diplomatic transcriptions and reading editions, along with digitized versions of the writings and related photographs (via IIIF). The relationship between photography and text (intermediality) can be analyzed through various search and display modes. Using geographic map features and an interactive timeline, Schwarzenbach's movement through time and space can be explored. Places, names, and keywords (as well as potentially other entities) are linked with authority databases (such as GND, VIAF, IdRef, and GeoNames) and assigned identifiers, making them searchable beyond the project as linked open data. Ultimately, the edition's data will also be published as research data (versioned, freely accessible/openly licensed) on FAIR repositories such as DaSCH and Zenodo.

Subproject Letters, University of Zurich: Prof. Dr. Sabine Schneider

Subproject Short Forms, University of Geneva: Prof. Dr. Christine Weder

Project Coordination, Universities of Geneva and Zurich: Dr. Elias Zimmermann