Scholarly journals and newspapers of the Enlightenment
| Scholarly journals and newspapers of the Enlightenment | |
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| Sponsorship | Academy of Sciences in Göttingen |
| place | Goettingen , Germany |
| Website | https://gelehre-journale.de |
The project Learned Journals and Newspapers as Networks of Knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment (GJZ 18) is a research project of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen . It is financed through the academies program , the largest humanities research program in the Federal Republic of Germany. The Academy of Sciences in Göttingen is one of a total of eight science academies in Germany that have come together in the Union of German Academies of Sciences .
History and structure of the project
As part of the research project GJZ 18, the most important German-speaking representatives of the learned journals of the 18th century are being indexed and made accessible in a research database. The main focus is on interdisciplinary journals, which take into account the humanities and social sciences as well as the natural sciences and, in addition to original articles, reviews and learned news, also contain all facets of anti-criticism.
As the third in a series of long-term projects started in 1975, GJZ 18 has been following on from two previous projects since 2011, which are described below. In the index of German-language journals (IdZ 18, duration 1975–1986), mixed general-interest and literary journals from 1750–1815 were indexed. The corpus roughly corresponds to the general development on the German magazine market of the 18th and early 19th centuries. With the subsequent Systematic Index on German-language review journals of the 18th century (IdRZ 18, term 1987–2007) the book reviews of the most important interdisciplinary review journals of the 18th century (1688–1784) were indexed. The resulting entries are both provided with keywords and classified in a contemporary scientific system based on the “Encyclopedic Table” from the General Repertory of Literature (1793–1807) by Johann Samuelersch . This register systematically records a large part of the reviews of current publications in German and foreign language journals for the period from 1785 to 1800. The underlying system was designed by Christian Gottfried Schütz and Gottlieb Hufeland for the repertory and also serves the GJZ 18 project in an abbreviated form as the basis for the systematic classification of the journal content according to subject areas.
The indexing results of the three projects IdZ 18, IdRZ 18 and GJZ 18 will be brought together in a research database, which will create a source of at least 323 journals. The database aims to provide the most comprehensive set of instruments in Europe for research into the Enlightenment and its journalism.
In order to take into account the regional distribution of the selected journals, they are indexed at three workplaces in Göttingen , Leipzig and Munich with a total of 13 humanities employees and an IT manager. The project works in cooperation with the Lower Saxony State and University Library Göttingen (SUB Göttingen), the University Library Leipzig (UB Leipzig) and the Bavarian State Library Munich (BSB Munich).
Subject and objective of the project
Building on the results of the previous projects IdZ 18 and IdRZ 18, GJZ 18 not only expands the research corpus, but also the scope of the data collected. Also included in the corpus were primarily interdisciplinary scholarly journals that appeared between 1688 and 1800 and, thanks to their long running time and their wide regional spread , can be considered representative of the Enlightenment period . The journals are cataloged by year by creating a data record for each individual article in a journal volume, which provides the user with both bibliographical and content information on the article in question. It is to be expected - not least with a view to the conceptual structure of the medium of the learned journal - that new insights and impulses for the research of the Enlightenment knowledge culture will emerge from the developed material.
Historical background
The learned journals are a medium that was first introduced in France, England and Italy from 1665, and also in German-speaking countries from 1682, and quickly established itself in the journalistic market. Its great success is primarily due to the fact that it not only informed large parts of the educated public about new publications on the book market, about research projects and research results, about learned people and institutions, but also promptly and critically.
In this way the scholarly journals became central forums for discussion, acquisition, preservation and dissemination of scholarly as well as popular knowledge. As such, they had a lasting influence on the contemporary conception of knowledge, science and science, as well as the development of a critical public and the bourgeois emancipation efforts of the time. Not least for this reason, they can be considered 'key works' of the Enlightenment.
The learned magazines already played this role in the perception of contemporaries. Therefore, parallel to the rapidly growing number of new publications on the magazine market of the 18th century, the need for bibliographical aids to catalog them became more and more urgent. But even the General Repertory of Literature , the largest contemporary cataloging project for journal literature of the (late) 18th century, only managed to systematically record the contents of a comparatively narrow corpus of journal volumes. The aim of GJZ 18 is to overcome the organizational and technical restrictions to which this bibliographic company was subject and to develop the content of a larger journal corpus over a longer period of time with the help of a database.
Scientific goal setting
Instead of a mere OCR- based text indexing, the purpose of the GJZ 18 project with its equally extensive and in-depth journal evaluation is primarily to provide research with an untapped treasure trove of bibliographical, personal and factual information on all areas and to make available phenomena of the knowledge culture of the 18th century in a processed form. For example, the research database provides information on how the scientific-historical tendencies of the time were reflected in the journals, but also to what extent the journals themselves exerted an influence on science policy through their selective range of information as well as through the journalistic support of learned controversies. Furthermore, the database user can find out which publications, which have now largely been forgotten, were given great attention by contemporaries and which results of learned diligence were never published. In terms of the history of science, it is also of particular interest which rules have emerged over time for the proper assessment of what has been published or which role women played in the learned republic. The GJZ 18 project offers the possibility of deepening, expanding and revising our knowledge not only through the development of the entire spectrum of science during the Enlightenment period, but also through the emergence of the enlightened knowledge and communication society.
Research database
The development results of the GJZ 18 project (including those of the predecessor projects IdZ 18 and IdRZ 18) are made available via the research database. It offers several detailed search access points, links to the digitized article in question, links to a catalog entry in the library associations for reviewed works and, if possible, to the digitized version of the reviewed work. In addition, there are interfaces to the journal database (ZDB) and to the directories of the 17th and 18th century prints published in the German-speaking area ( VD 17 , VD 18 ).
The combination of the use of the science system and the assignment of keywords based on the project's internal thesaurus (person, subject and geography keywords) enables the user to use different search strategies. In this way, the database can not only be searched specifically for individual persons, work titles or keywords, the database entries can also be systematically grouped according to subject areas.
Numerous research questions, for example on the history of science or on magazine and reception research, can be answered and graphically represented with the help of facets - by simply combining various parameters. For example, an interactive histogram related to the individual search query visualizes the frequency distribution of the search terms on a time axis and can, if necessary, be used to select a specific period or year.
In addition to the search entry via the simple and advanced search (the latter is continuously in development) and the entry via the subject system, the user can also start the search directly from the magazine corpus. In addition to the current status of the indexing of the individual volumes, all bibliographical information can be found here for every journal. In the case of journals from the GJZ18 corpus that have already been cataloged, this information is also supplemented by information on the history of the publication and the respective profile, for example on the publisher, the staff or the program of the journal. Furthermore, the database offers statistical evaluations according to subject areas for a number of journals, which can also be used as a search point.
IT and technical infrastructure
The research database has been technically fully integrated into library data management since 2014. To describe the infrastructure of the project, a distinction is made between an internal and an external data processing side. Internal means the project-internal creation / processing / presentation of data , whereas external groups together the holders of standard data, digitized data and, if applicable, full texts, to which internal links are made whenever possible or available. A return flow of GJZ18 data is potentially possible (e.g. to improve data in network databases). However, the project does not create digital copies of magazines or keep them on our own servers for online presentation and use.
From the magazine article to the presentation on the project website, all data sets go through three structurally independent sections that are linked to one another by programming interfaces:
- Data creation (network database and WinIBW): The data records of the GJZ18 corpus are created with the library software WinIBW in the data format Pica3 and stored in a database of the joint library network (GBV) in the internal format Pica + made available to the project . Additional databases can be added to the GJZ18 database after the original metadata format has been converted into the Pica format, as was implemented accordingly for the databases of the previous projects.
- Data processing (OAI and Solr): Once a day, newly created and modified data records are extracted from the GBV database to a separate server via OAI-PMH (harvested), processed according to project-specific rules in XML format and indexed by a project-specific search engine server ( Apache Solr ). This procedure is necessary in order to be able to offer a special repertoire of search, filter and statistical functions.
- Data presentation (website) and data enrichment: The project website is designed and developed by the project using the TYPO3 content management system . An interface software developed by SUB Göttingen connects the website and search engine server, enables standard search functions and makes index data displayable. The Solr index described in section 2 is enriched via an internal project wiki, which is primarily used as a manual on working practice, for example with journal profiles or synonym lists, which are relevant for increased findability of data records.
The servers mentioned in Sections 2 and 3 are operated and technically maintained by the Göttingen SUB for reasons of performance, data availability , data security and backup options. The relevant services are further developed from the project side. Standards in the choice of formats and frameworks ensure the sustainable usability and maintainability of all modules. The core modules in the data processing and data presentation sections are redundantly in the same version on different servers, which results in a very high level of failure safety for those modules. Furthermore, the keeping of all modules with large partners such as the SUB Göttingen, the GBV or the Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftlichen Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (GWDG) offers general data security and high availability of the data. Thanks to numerous interfaces on all core modules, the project can be easily networked internally and externally. By embedding all IT components in the library and research landscape, this infrastructure forms a suitable basis for a strategy of distributed long-term archiving .
The website is under constant development and will be expanded to include additional evaluation tools, a help system and a broader detailed search. Work is also ongoing on optimizing the search engine index, for example in order to obtain a large amount of information on linked authority data from the Common Authority File (GND) e.g. B. to make person and location records available on the website.
In the course of numerous modifications of the data schema after the introduction of RDA , the data collected in the project was checked for semantisability. Already during the conception of the data schema and the recording practice it became clear that the project offers expansion possibilities in the sense of Semantic Web . First and foremost, the standard data fields and also the keyword fields contain semantisable data. In the future, the database would be able to function as a separate semantic network as a link between other semantic networks. In the near future, artificial intelligence- supported text recognition programs , such as machine learning and data mining , could be supported by the connections between topics in the keyword, book titles, standardized place names, personal names and corporate bodies verified by project staff .
See also
- Book trade in the 18th century
- Women's magazine
- List of early modern magazines
- Moral weekly
- Press history in Germany
Individual evidence
- ↑ On questions of terminology cf. Thomas Habel: Scholarly journals and newspapers of the Enlightenment. Bremen 2007, chap. 1.2.
- ↑ Cf. Thomas Habel: Scholar Journals and Newspapers of the Enlightenment. Bremen 2007, chap. 11.
- ↑ Johann Samuelersch (ed.): General Repertory of Literature for the years 1785 to 1790 . Vol. 1, H. 1. Jena 1793, S. 1. Munich Digitization Center (MDZ-Reader): General Repertory of Literature. Retrieved November 6, 2017 .
- ↑ Cf. Thomas Habel: Scholar Journals and Newspapers of the Enlightenment. Bremen 2007, chap. 10.
- ^ SUB Göttingen - projects & research - projects - learned journals and newspapers of the Enlightenment. Website of the Lower Saxony State and University Library Göttingen. Retrieved November 5, 2017.
- ↑ Leipzig University Library - Research Library - Projects - Scholarly Journals. Website of the Leipzig University Library. Retrieved November 5, 2017.
- ^ BSB Munich - About us - Projects - Scholarly journals and newspapers as networks of knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment. Website of the Bavarian State Library in Munich. Retrieved November 5, 2017.
- ↑ Cf. Thomas Habel: Scholar Journals and Newspapers of the Enlightenment. Bremen 2007, chap. 3-5.
literature
- Claire Gantet, Flemming Schock (ed.): Magazines, journalism and learned communication in the 18th century. Festschrift for Thomas Habel. Bremen: Edition Lumière 2014. ISBN 978-3-943245-20-2
- Claire Gantet: Les périodiques savants de l'époque de l'Enlightenment, mises en réseaux du savoir: un program de l'Académie des sciences et lettres de Göttingen . In: Dix-Huitième Siècle , 46 (2014), pp. 695–708. ISBN 978-2-7071-8204-3 , ISSN 0070-6760
- Thomas Habel: The latest from the Respublica Litteraria. On the genesis of the German “learned sheets” in the late 17th and early 18th centuries . In: Volker Bauer, Holger Böning (ed.): The emergence of the newspaper industry in the 17th century. A new medium and its consequences for the communication system of the early modern era . Bremen: Edition Lumière 2011, pp. 303–340. ISBN 978-3-934686-82-3
- Thomas Habel: German-language scholar journals and newspapers . In: Ulrich Rasche (ed.): Sources on early modern university history. Types, stocks, research perspectives. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2011 (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 128), pp. 341–398. ISBN 978-3-447-06604-4
- Thomas Habel: Scholarly journals and newspapers of the Enlightenment. On the origins, development and indexing of German-language review magazines of the 18th century. Bremen: Edition Lumière 2007. ISBN 978-3-934686-28-1
- Wiebke Hemmerling: Promised fruits, empty bowls. On the journal debate in Germany in the early 18th century . In: Scientia Poetica , 15 (2011), pp. 115-153. ISSN 1431-5041
- Katrin Löffler (ed.): Knowledge in motion. Scholarly journals, debates, and the bookshops of the Enlightenment. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner 2020. ISBN 978-3-515-12595-6
Web links
- Website of the GJZ 18 project
- Description of the GJZ 18 project on the website of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences
- Description of the GJZ 18 project on the website of the Union of German Academies of Sciences
- DNB data sets of the journals / works mentioned in the captions: