Version 4.0 of the Johann Caspar Lavater Correspondence Edition now available

Version 4.0 publishes for the first time 660 letters that have been automatically transcribed using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) via Transkribus. This means that letters transcribed with HTR are now available online in the JCLB ‘network’ and can also be accessed via full-text search. The transcription model used (developed by Science IT) was based on letters from the edition section that had already been transcribed by hand. The letters transcribed using HTR are published via the same channels, but are clearly recognisable in the online edition and easily distinguishable from the letters created in the ‘edition’.

When opening a letter transcribed by HTR, the text remains blurred for a short time.

The ‘Network’ list contains the following stages: Edited, Transcribed, Indexed and HTR:

New additions to the edition include the correspondence between Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801) and the writers Christoph Meiners (1747–1810) and Johann Anton Sulzer (1752–1828), that with the philosopher Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823), and the three correspondences with the artists Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki (1726–1801), Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741–1825) and Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814). Letters submitted later from the late years of the dense correspondence between Lavater and Johann Georg Zimmermann (1728–1795) also supplement the JCLB edition.