correspSearch, entwickelt an der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ermöglicht die Suche in den Daten zu über 100.000 Briefen nach Absender:innen, Adressat:innen, Orten und Briefdatum.
Letters are considered some of the most valuable sources for historical research. Not only does their content cover a variety of different themes, events, persons, etc., but letters also depict networks between people.
Yet due to editorial and practical reasons historical letters are generally only partially edited—focusing often only on one person or on the correspondence between two persons. In order to address questions on topics like relationship networks, it is necessary to do elaborate research using multiple editions of letters. This challenge has been long recognized in the academic community.
The web service ‘correspSearch’ takes a step in this direction, collecting the letter metadata from separate editions and repositories and making the data available through open interfaces, based on the foundations of TEI-XML and under a free license. Through this service the indexes of different digital and print letter editions can be quickly and easily searched according to sender, addressee, writing location, and date.
correspSearch ist auch auf Twitter vertreten.
Mittlerweile ist die Sammlung auf über 200.000 Briefe gewachsen, wie das DHd-Blog berichtet.