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07/02/2024 | Pressemitteilung

The Brothers Grimm fairy tale reference library is being digitized

The Brothers Grimm left behind a great deal of handwriting in the books they used for the Children's and Household Tales. A new digitization project is now making these culturally and historically significant documents accessible to the public. Partners from Würzburg, Berlin and Kassel are involved; the German Research Foundation is funding the project.

Digital copy — Handwritten note by Jacob Grimm on the keyword "Barbarossa" (underlined in the printed text) and below it the current automatic transcription with transcription errors marked in red (green: correction; words that are difficult to decipher have not been corrected).

When you hear "Brothers Grimm", you immediately think of Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and other fairy tales - and not only in Germany: the collection of "Children's and Household Tales" compiled by the folklorists and linguists Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) is one of the most famous works of world literature.

Most of the brothers' private library can be found in the university library of the Humboldt University in Berlin. The books, of which around 700 relate to the Brothers Grimm's Children's and Household Tales, are also particularly valuable because of the traces of work they contain: the Grimms crossed out passages of text, made handwritten notes in the margins and inserted notepads.

Until now, anyone seeking access to these culturally and historically significant sources has had to rely on the originals. A new project is therefore pursuing the goal of making the books digitally accessible, with all their traces of use and provenance - the latter are indications of the origin and ownership history of the works. For the first time, this digital access should also enable new methodological approaches to research.

Project partners from Würzburg, Berlin and Kassel

In the interdisciplinary project "Digital Fairy Tale Reference Library of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm", two researchers from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg are responsible for the technological part, while a researcher from the University Library of HU Berlin is in charge of indexing, digitizing and publishing a selected part of the collection. In terms of philology, the project is being supervised by Professor Dr. Holger Ehrhardt from the "Works and Activities of the Brothers Grimm" department at the University of Kassel. The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding the project. It will start on September 1, 2024 and run for three years.

A challenge for computer science

In addition to the full-text indexing of the printed texts, the focus of the project is on identifying, transcribing and linking the numerous handwritten annotations. This is a particular challenge: the automatic methods developed to date for font and layout recognition are not capable of producing usable full texts of annotated prints and simultaneously evaluating handwritten artifacts.

All project results will be made publicly accessible on the Internet and made available for further use. The web viewer will also contain specific research functions for navigation in the annotations. As a result, the project partners will be able to provide a routine workflow that will enable the digitization of further segments of the Grimm Library and other scholarly libraries.

The Brothers Grimm digitization project:
https://www.ub.hu-berlin.de/de/ueber-uns/projekte/digitale-maerchen-handbibliothek-von-jacob-und-wilhelm-grimm

Contact:

Prof. Dr. Holger Ehrhardt
University of Kassel
Tel: +49 561 804-7455
E-Mail: holger.ehrhardt[at]uni-kassel[dot]de