Johann Heinrich Sulger: Reisebericht

The Basel mercenary officer Johann Heinrich Sulger (1646-1699) wrote an extensive travelogue of around 500 manuscript pages after his discharge from the service of the Dutch East India Company. This account provides diverse insights into his seven-year deployment in the border regions of Dutch hegemonic ambitions in Southeast Asia.

As part of the SNSF project «Digital Edition and Global Microhistory: A Basel Colonial Mercenary in the Southeast Asian Archipelago of the 17th Century» (2024-2028), a hybrid edition of this multifaceted ego document is being created. This edition will be made accessible to researchers and an interested readership in the form of both a digital and a physical historical source edition.

The goal of the digital edition is to make the early modern text accessible through a critical apparatus, semantic text markup, and enrichment with authority data and linked open data, as well as visualization using cartographic material based on a TEI/XML-encoded edition text.

• Text annotation according to TEI/XML in Oxygen XML Editor
• GitHub (version control)
• For the register database, we use the archive database Anton
• Publication of the digital edition in TEI Publisher

• Commented edition text
• Faceted search options in full text and metadata
• Exploration through register data (name, place, and extensive subject index)
• Visualization through cartographic material and dynamic itinerary
• Integration of the digital facsimile (via IIIF)
• Researching intertextual references by linking with (digitized) manuscript collections
• Publication of edition data as research data according to the FAIR principles

Roberto Zaugg (UZH, Project Lead)

Myriam Schmidt (UZH, Research Associate)

Susanna Burghartz (University of Basel, Cooperation Partner and Co-Editor)