Lecture by Dr Stefan Heßbrüggen-Walter in the context of the research colloquium "Digital Perspectives", SoSe 2022

The project to be presented in the lecture pursues both a subject-specific and method-oriented research interest. From a scholarly point of view, it is about the history of ideas and culture of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment research as a multilingual phenomenon, which is to be explored with digital methods. The question will be which canon or canons - this is already an open question - have been used as a basis for Enlightenment research in different disciplines. It is not a question of a historically given canon, i.e., not the question of who was considered worthy of canonization in the 18th century. Rather, the canons of different scientific cultures and disciplines in the reception of Enlightenment traditions will be explored in the longue durée of two centuries (roughly between 1800 and 2000). The epoch of Enlightenment was a European phenomenon. It is probably best approached from a comparative, i.e. linguistic, perspective. The aim of the project in the scholarly dimension is thus the study of canons of the Enlightenment in three language cultures (German, English, French) and explicitly in a multidisciplinary perspective, for example philosophy and literary studies, but also including history in the broadest sense. Methodically, the source value of the digital library provided by the Hathitrust with scans and full texts from American university libraries will be investigated. The focus will be on the epistemic value of metadata. In particular, the monolingual, i.e. English, indexing of a multilingual corpus will be addressed.

Information about the lecturer can be found at downloads.