ABSTRACT

"Johann Friedrich Blumenbach – Online" took off on what is anticipated to be a fifteen-year journey of application and innovation of the possibilities provided by the Internet in making Blumenbach and his oeuvre available to an international readership. A digital edition differs in two important respects from traditional edition projects. First, it can provide more than just text and include images of, and information about, physical objects which can readily be hyperlinked to a considerable extent of both breadth and depth. Second, an online edition makes Blumenbach's work accessible to digital tools that are starting to supplement – not wholly supplant – traditional hermeneutic approaches. Instead of presenting texts only as strings of letters and objects as plain images, "Blumenbach – Online" enriches them with metadata and standardized personal names and geographical names. This makes it possible to connect data with other editions, library catalogues, search engines, and even Wikipedia articles.