Thinking Education Across Borders – Wilhelm Rein's Pedagogical Correspondence Estate

In cooperation with the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the BBF is indexing the extensive international pedagogical correspondence of the influential educationalist Wilhelm Rein (1847–1929). The DFG-funded project combines archival and information science methods in order to make the source corpus of educational historical interest permanently available. The aim is to enable a transnational and comparative analysis of Rein's diverse pedagogical contacts and transnational discourses using methods from the digital humanities.

Rein held the first full professorship for pedagogy in Germany. As a teacher educator and reform-oriented pedagogical networker, he was in contact and lively written exchange with a wide variety of actors from the most diverse pedagogical contexts. Approximately 6,300 letters from the years 1869 to 1929 by around 3,500 authors from more than 40 countries are available. They have already been digitised in a previous project. The metadata, which is also already available, will be checked, standardised and enriched with standard entries for places, persons and corporate bodies from the Integrated Authority File (GND) and linked to the digital images of the original letters.

In a next step, digital full texts will be generated by transcribing the letters in the markup language TEI/XML, so that a structured, citable, digital corpus will be created as a basis for the educational-historical analysis of the correspondence network.

In the course of the project, the digitised facsimiles and the transcriptions in TEI/XML will be successively published via the BBF platform EditionenBildungsgeschichte and will then be freely available as a reusable resource for further research and content analysis.

Rein-Edition

• Dr. Katja Grundig de Vazquez (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)

• Stefanie Borsch
• Dr. Stefan Cramme
• Annett Krefft
• Max Schmöle
• Klaus Thoden