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project description  ¦  project assistants

Lectures of Wittgenstein on Aesthetics Contextualized (Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik im Kontext)

Lectures on Aesthetics Contextualized (Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik im Kontext) is a project whose aim is to create a fully navigable electronic corpus of passages in Wittgenstein's writings dealing with the matters of aesthetics, psychoanalysis and religion. Thus, we use Wittgenstein’s 1938-lectures (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief = LC) as a starting point and a thematic anchor from which hyperlinks to ICE and BEE will be created. As such, thematically link segments of Wittgenstein’s thought will be available for systematic investigation by philosophers, historians of philosophy, cultural historians, philologists and social scientists for the first time. Thus, it can be expected that other disciplines may also benefit from this kind of editing and semantic linking of primary sources and can help scholars searching, navigating, and thus understanding textual sources.
The researchers involved (from FIBA and WAB) will actively investigate new ways of electronic editing in humanities by applying state-of-the-art technologies and methods (such as computer-supported content analysis or XML/ TEI). They will explore key questions challenging the hitherto existing ways of researching, and will thus uncover innovative ways to ask new questions.
A successful completion of the project will facilitate the researchers’ queries for thematically relevant text passages (on aesthetics etc.) in both the entire BEE (Nachlass) and the entire ICE (Correspondence) by providing them with a network of hyperlinks based on semantic markups and thus a fully navigable corpus. Identifying, labeling and tagging of all passages in the entire Briefwechsel (ICE) as well as the Nachlass (BEE) which are thematically/semantically dealing with matters of aesthetics (psychology/psychoanalysis and religious belief) will be done according to guidelines corporately compiled in an index provided by WAB and FIBA. In order to supply researchers with a fully navigable electronic corpus, we will produce a machine-readable critical diplomatic edition of LC (according to XML/TEI standards), supplemented with historical-cultural commentary.
Both the diplomatic electronic edition of LC as well as the hyperlinked editions of all three LC, BEE and ICE will be produced in cooperation with InteLex Corporation and might be made accessible online.

This project is funded by FWF. Thanks to Pierre and Françoise Stonborough who have given us unpublished materials and Dr. Adam and Dr. Sophie Zielinski for their generous aid for further research in this field.