Both due to their fame and content, Humboldt’s American Travel Journals can be considered the focal point of . They contain records of all stages of the great American expedition (June 5, 1799–March 8, 1804) with visits to the Hispanic American viceroyalties of New Granada, Peru and New Spain, the sugar and coffee island of Cuba and the United States of America. In addition, there are records of European trips before 1799 (e.g. to England, Dresden, Vienna, Salzburg) as well as immediately after his return, in 1805 to Rome.

A glance at the manuscripts soon shows that the generic term travel journal does not adequately describe the famous manuscripts. At times, the text complies with the decorum of its genre, presenting the reader a string of chronologically assembled notations along the itinerary of an expedition. More typical, however, are the numerous discontinuities, the new beginnings, corrections, additions and extensions, the frequent yet often failed attempts to create order through indexing and cross-referencing; attempts to provide a coherent framework for a complex body of texts that were created and re-organized, not only during the expedition, but over a period of five decades until the final binding of the journals in the shape and form that we know today Erdmann/Weber 2015: 67. The peculiarity of their composition shows that the journals are more than Humboldt’s notebooks of a specific expedition. Instead, they became a crucial testing ground for his writing. They stand paradigmatically for Humboldt’s scientific model of intertwined research and knowledge, already evident in the functional variance of the journals themselves, uniting such diverse functions as research book, measurement chart, sketchbook, logbook, travelogue and political diary (Lenz 2015: 80, transl. T. K.).

Like almost no other testimony in Humboldt’s work, they exemplify the dynamism of Humboldtian thinking and composition technique, for which Ottmar Ette has coined the notion of a science on the move, present in AvH-R’s project title:

It is no wonder that Humboldt, despite his low inclination to tie himself to objects or manuscripts for a long time, wrote in 1853 in a letter to his friend, the astronomer Johann Franz Encke:

Humboldt knew the epistemic, symbolic and personal value of his journals. It took him almost 40 years to publish the results of his two hemispheric voyages, starting with the in 1805/1807 and ending with the 2-volume in 1843. Humboldt’s American and Russian-Siberian journals constitute the connecting element in this monumental composition.

Already in the first edition of Humboldt’s widely popular tropical landscape reader (1808) and to a much larger extent in the three volumes of his famous travel narrative, the (1814–1825[–1831]), there are direct borrowings from the American travel journals, a writer’s workshop detail that the author himself frequently likes to point out to his readers.

In fact, Humboldt’s travel journals are present all over his American works: Much of the data Humboldt assembled during his American journey on astronomical-geographic positioning and barometric height measurements as well as the description of his instruments can also be found in the (1810 [1808–1811]). In the famous Atlas on American landscapes and Mesoamerican Cultures ([1810–]1813) as well as in his political geography on Mexico, the (1811), it is primarily Humboldt’s ethnological and socio-economic observations and judgments that he edits and transfers from his extensive journal entries.

The same applies for obvious reasons to the Russian-Siberian journals. They form the basis for the elaboration of the two-volume (1831), which Humboldt hastily publishes only three years after returning from his Russian-Siberian expedition. More than a decade later, his main accomplishment on Asian geography, climatology, and earth magnetism, the two-volume (1843), is completed, again including the Russian-Siberian travel journals as a key source Honigmann 2014: 74–76. An extensive manuscript found in the SBB papers Humboldt [1836] shows that Humboldt had made detailed excerpts from his journals for his travel companion, the Prussian geologist and mineralogist Gustav Rose. They were elaborated presumably in 1836 and provided helpful data for Rose’s report on the Russian-Siberian Voyage Rose 1837/1842.

Even beyond the American and Asian travel opus, Humboldt’s journals stay present in his printed works, i.e. in the (1853) as well as in all five volumes of the (1845–1862), with excerpts on volcanism, astronomical observations or chemical experiments Faak 2003: 25–27.

A second parallel between the American and the Russian-Siberian journals concerns their presence as objects introduced to the reader of his text. As shown in the quote, Humboldt would regularly use his journals to aesthetically manage his readers’ expectations, suggesting that he was about to literally extract the wording of his journals in the printed texts. In most cases, this turned out to be a literary feint Suckow 2009: 8. Humboldt understood that his journals would help the argument of his published works, since the reference to the (supposed) self-quotation allowed him to point to the authentic content of the following passage and, incidentally, to recall the adventurous event of the journey itself. The frequent staging of the journals as ground truth of the published text also reveals that the travel manuscripts had already developed a media presence in their own right at the time.

In addition to the similarities, the clear differences between the two sets of travel journals must also be addressed. They differ as much as the journeys of which they bear witness Ette 2009: 21–23. Humboldt financed the Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent himself with the fortune he had inherited after the death of his mother Elisabeth in 1796. Humboldt’s itinerary through the American tropics followed his personal and scientific intentions alone, including all the uncertainties of a journey, which was by no means linear or planned from the outset Leitner 2016.

None of this can be said for his trip thirty years later: The Russian-Siberian journey (April 12 to December 28, 1829) took place at the expense and under the control of Emperor Nicholas I. The travel permission was accompanied by the obligation to refrain from criticising society, the economy or political rule in the Russian Empire in all written testimonies. During the trip, Humboldt was often subject to the official protocol of public receptions and had little time for more flexible travel arrangements or situational changes due to his own work assignments. The journey itself followed a strict schedule and left little room for detours or time-outs from the given route (which, nevertheless, Humboldt took the liberty to pursue at times). In eight months, a distance of at least 19,000 km was covered, leading from Berlin via Königsberg, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan and Perm across the Urals and the Altai Mountains to the Chinese border, from whence he returned to Berlin via Minsk, Orenburg and Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea and finally again via Moscow and St. Petersburg back home to Berlin Humboldt 2009: 52. Humboldt’s room for manoeuvre was also restricted by an increased division of labour. The naturalists accompanying him, the mineralogist Gustav Rose and the botanist and zoologist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, were meant to do their share of the common research goals, present their own publications on the extensive trip and also – in the case of Rose – write the report of the journey.

For these reasons, the subject-matters of the travel journals are much narrower. The titles chosen by Humboldt already make this clear:

Whereas the Fragments are largely notes and comprehensive research data along the various stages of the journey, including short entries on economics, geography, ethnography and politics, as well as on the itinerary and various travel encounters, the (Volume 2) essentially contain extracts from Volume 1, mainly astronomical and geomagnetic measurement series and conversions. Volume 3, finally, is mainly devoted to geomagnetism research and compares measurements from several European cities over a longer period (1806–1836). Volumes 2 and 3 are also co-productions to a large extent, as Humboldt’s notes and data were, at his request, first recalculated and reviewed by his assistant Jabbo Oltmann and later by the Director of the Berlin Observatory, the aforementioned Johann Franz Encke Honigmann 2014: 73.

Next to the two-fold corpus of Humboldt’s travel journals, the scholarly hybrid edition series is preparing a carefully selected collection of manuscripts, correspondences and unpublished papers relevant to the research fields of Humboldtian Science. The collection is organized in five topics:

The first topic Plant Geography and Biosciences is dedicated to Alexander von Humboldt’s bioscientific research, primarily his records, studies and correspondence on plant geography. The scholarly edition of the documents related to this topic was published in several versions over a period of two years between 2017 and 2019 as part of Päßler 2017–2019 and is currently being prepared to be released in print Humboldt 2020. For the first time ever, these documents show Humboldt’s continuous work on a planned second and revised edition of his famous , which Humboldt wanted to finish in the 1820s. The volume’s editor Ulrich Päßler writes: The work in this discipline is one of Humboldt’s most important research achievements. They contain reflections on the theory of plant geography and plant arithmetic, on landscape types, on the conditions for the migration of plants and their adaptation to climatic conditions. Päßler 2017

The second topic, Scientific Travels, concentrates on records and letters for planning, carrying out and evaluating the research trips and for supporting other explorers and artists, such as the Schlagintweit brothers, Carl Philipp Martius and Johann Moritz Rugendas. The section’s corpus also contains the 300+ letter correspondence with his fellow travelmate Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg as well as Ehrenberg’s own journal of the 1829 expedition. The documents, papers, and correspondences selected for this topic will shed a new light on the composition, culture, and economy of 19th century travel research collections in the Humboldt circle.Some of the abovementioned documents – among them Ehrenberg’s travel journal – can already be accessed at edition humboldt digital, cf. Ehrenberg 2019.

The third topic Earth Science focuses on publishing preliminary studies on his political-geographical writings as well as selected correspondence on questions of geology and mineralogy, physical geography, and paleontology.

The fourth topic covers the fields of astronomy, cartography, metrology, measuring instruments and Humboldt’s studies on the history of discovery; in other words, texts that are of great relevance for understanding his late works and .

The concluding fifth topic concentrates on Humboldt’s anthropological and cultural-historical research. For this purpose, the project will evaluate and edit recordings of Humboldt’s studies on the global history of planetary consciousness, North and Mesoamerican language and cultural history, the archaeology of American antiquity, the migration and cultural history of indigenous people as well as the topic of slavery.

The printed edition of the edition places a clear emphasis on legibility and coherence. The focus is on text continuity and critical commentary by the editors, not on the philological detail recording of all individual textual phenomena. The complexity of both the textual form and the discursive order of the American Travel Journals, for instance, also implies that the print edition attempts to reconstruct a specific textual order and chronology. All omissions and textual conjunctions resulting from the reconstruction of the journals’ chronological order will be marked symbolically in the print type and refer to the complete text, accessible in the online edition. The associated approach of a reader-text on the one hand (print) and a critically elaborated research-text on the other hand (online) applies analogously to the text selection of the Nachlass corpus (see The corpus, part III). The main goal of the print edition is not to present the manuscripts, personal papers, and correspondences in the full extent of their scholarly critique. Instead, focuses on the careful curation of individual documents and letters in their specific context, supplemented by research contributions from specialists, who were given prior access to the newly edited source material. Nevertheless, all of these texts – both by Humboldt and from the scholarly community – are always published first in their (native) digital environment at https://edition-humboldt.de.

While the print edition is primarily aimed at a general public interested in Humboldt with a desire for linear reading and concentrated text study, the online edition is a dynamic research tool optimised to the needs of research in terms of its demand for textual philological criticism and processing of data. realises this potential through a consistent use of standards, curation of past research results as well as re-use and integration of other Humboldt resources and web services.

is committed to the goals of Open Access and Open Science and therefore fully available for free – without even a moving wall. Due to a clear Creative Commons licensing (CC BY-SA 4.0), the edition allows the most diverse scenarios of subsequent use and further adaptation to the needs of research.

CC BY-SA 4.0 stands for a Creative Commons Attribution -ShareAlike 4.0-License. For details cf. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.

As most digital scholarly editions (in the sense of Sahle 2013: 148–149) do, the edition is flexible in the presentation of its material: the online interface allows viewing text-critical transcription and facsimile as well as a text view optimized for online reading. It is possible to change the view between the different presentations of the text at any time. The facsimile and the text transcription are linked to each other with page precision, whereby the readability of the text is given priority over the attempt to imitate the exact layout of the manuscript as comprehensively as possible. The conceptual principle of the edition thus follows a text-oriented rather than a document-oriented encoding.

uses existing Humboldt research resources and sees itself as a data curating and aggregating platform. This applies above all to the integration of (previously printed) name index data and (previously available as simple HTML) chronology research data. For the establishment of the place, person and institution name index, the indexes from 25 historic print editions of Alexander von Humboldt research published between 1973 and 2016 were integrated into the edition’s data base fig. 1.

The research data collected in these volumes is now available for the first time as TEI-XML compliant data sets. It has been editorially revised, linked and enriched with IDs from authority files (GND and VIAF) and geo-referenced data (GeoNames) for connection to external resources (e.g. other digital scholarly editions, Neue Deutsche Biographie, Wikipedia etc.). If an entry in the index of persons is provided with a GND-ID, not only the ID is used to link external offers. The GND data record is also retrieved and stored as an additional information layer in the . The dataset provides, among other things, family and other relations to a person. This enables automated links to index entries of relatives, e.g. father or wife, in a person entry (see fig. 2). Of course, data records in the GND can be incomplete or erroneous, but this work could only have been done manually with (too) much effort. Currently, more than 10,000 entries on people fig. 2, places, and institutions related to Humboldt are available online.

https://edition-humboldt.de/register/index.xql?l=en.

The data curation of the Alexander von Humboldt Chronology, finally, adopted a highly valuable information resource that has been highly relevant to the international Humboldt community since its first print publication in 1968 Schwarz 2017. In order to integrate these important data sets into , the chronological entries of Humboldt’s life were converted into more than 1,400 TEI-XML documents and have been successively indexed with the name entity database. As with the creation of data from printed indexes, saving the results of decades of research activity, the conversion of the Humboldt Chronology exemplifies the growing need of digital curation of research data previously only available in print.

In the user interface of the , the data of the chronology is digitally supplemented with data from other resources. For example, not only the edited letters from the edition can be displayed, but also all hitherto edited letters from and to Alexander Humboldt. This is achieved by retrieving the records from the API of the web service correspSearch Dumont 2016,

https://correspSearch.net.

In addition to reusing and integrating digital resources created elsewhere, also uses external web services to enrich its own data or to prepare it for specific applications. The edited texts are sent to the web service of the German Text Archiv (DTA::CAB, Jurish 2012), where they are linguistically analysed and then re-integrated into the edition as an additional data layer (this feature is currently limited to German texts). The documents annotated linguistically in this way enable a lemma-based search in the historical texts. Thus the search for sammeln finds all word forms and historical spellings occurring in the edition, e.g. gesammlet. Currently under development is a second function that sends editorial as well as edited texts to the API of the translation web service and also saves them back as an (also additional) data layer. The aim is to make various contents of accessible in several languages in the future and thus to take the distinctly international Humboldt research community into account.

The works accumulatively and sees itself as a work-in-progress publication. While the publication of the printed volumes primarily marks the completion of individual parts of the editorial project as a whole, each new text or data set added to the online edition integrates itself into a network of already existing digital data and reference systems fig. 4. In order to maintain traceability on the level of individual documents, delivers each update as a new version of the edition’s entire XML database. All versions of the edited documents and data sets stay available online at all times as downloadable TEI-XML files, including the metadata set of each document.

The download availability is granted for the data fileset, but not for the visual representation of the edition’s respective version in its HTML rendering. Hence, there is data, but not webpage archiving and availability.