Bullinger digital – Digitization of the Bullinger correspondence

Overview

Crowdsourcing / Citizens’ science Digital Humanities Digitization of collections Historical Documents (e.g. Notarial sources; Census records; Ecclesiastical documents; Correspondence) Apps / Interfaces for data visualization OCR / HTR Platform for data aggregation or retrieval

Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575) was a collaborator and successor of Huldrich Zwingli and an important multiplier for the ideas of the Reformation in Switzerland and Europe. From his extensive correspondence, some 2000 letters that Bullinger wrote and 10,000 letters that he received have been preserved. The originals are kept in the Zurich State Archives and the Zurich Central Library. 80% of the letters are in Latin, most of the others in Early New High German. About 3100 letters have already been manually transcribed and edited by the Swiss Reformation Studies Institute in a project that spanned three decades. Another 5000 letters have been transcribed by the Swiss Reformation Studies Institute and are available as electronic texts.
The objective of our project “Bullinger digital” is the creation of a database with an entry for each letter from the Bullinger correspondence network with meta data (who has written a letter to whom on which date from which place), scan images, transcriptions and translations. Therefore, the following tasks are required:

• the scanning of all the original letters (by the Zurich State Archives and the Zurich Central Library);
• the automatic handwriting recognition for all letters that have not yet been transcribed. This requires the development of methods for dealing with handwritings for which we have only few letters (in collaboration with Digital Humanities, University of Bern and HES-SO Fribourg);
• building tailor-made systems for machine translation Latin into German, and Early New High
  German into modern German (based on manually translated letters as training material);
• the modernisation and expansion of the online search system with various visualisation options.

Project partners

With financial support by