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Wilhelm von Humboldt: Schriften
Welcome to Wilhelm von Humboldt: Schriften, an independent digital edition of the complete works of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Designed to be modern, accessible, and sustainable, the project offers TEI-encoded texts that are fully searchable and easy to explore.
About
An Independent Digital Edition
No grant, no office, no team — just a laptop, a few tutorials, and many late evenings. That’s how Wilhelm von Humboldt: Schriften began.
In autumn 2024, a young humanities graduate set herself an ambitious goal: to make Wilhelm von Humboldt’s writings freely accessible online. Unfortunately, most of his original manuscripts were lost during World War II, leaving only a printed edition from the early 1900s as the complete reference. Despite their significance in the German-speaking world, Humboldt’s works remain surprisingly hard to find online. Out of this frustration, Wilhelm von Humboldt: Schriften was born.
Working independently in her spare time, she began building the edition from scratch, using TEI Publisher and guidance from e-editiones (such as tutorials, blog posts, and personal mentorship). By May 2025, a simple static version of the website went live. Since then, the project has evolved into a dynamic digital edition, offering full-text search, facets, registers of persons and places, and a visual timeline.
Though still a work in progress, Wilhelm von Humboldt: Schriften aims to meet the academic standards of a scholarly digital edition, demonstrating that small-scale digital humanities initiatives can be both imaginative and rigorous when they leverage open-source tools and community support.
Highlights
Registers
Registers of individuals and places mentioned in the corpus offer a point of entry into the intricate social and geographical network of that era.
Core Team
Team
This project is currently being run by the curator:
More
Other resources
This section brings together external resources and collaborations related to the project Wilhelm von Humboldt: Schriften.
Presentation of the project at e-editiones
In November 2025, the project was presented at the e-editiones Community Meeting. The talk (in English) introduces the digital edition, outlines its methodological framework, and reflects on how the project emerged, as well as on practical challenges.
Cooperation with the Text+ initiative
This digital edition is part of the Text+ research data infrastructure and is included in the metacorpus Metakorpus Historische Korpora. Through this cooperation, the corpus is made accessible via the DTA/DWDS infrastructure and linked to a broader ecosystem of historical text corpora.
Kooperation
Das Projekt arbeitet mit folgenden Organisationen bzw. Einrichtungen zusammen:
All text data used in this project is taken from the edition by Albert Leitzmann (Hrsg.) (1903), Wilhelm von Humboldts Werke. Berlin: Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. The original texts are in the public domain.
The digital edition Wilhelm von Humboldt: Schriften, including the TEI-XML formatting and added metadata on this website, is subject to the Creative Commons-licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Alle Textdaten, die in diesem Projekt verwendet werden, stammen aus der Ausgabe von Albert Leitzmann (Hrsg.) (1903), Wilhelm von Humboldts Werke. Berlin: Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Die Originaltexte sind gemeinfrei.
Die digitale Edition Wilhelm von Humboldt: Schriften, einschließlich der TEI-XML-Formatierung und der hinzugefügten Metadaten dieser Website, unterliegt der Creative Commons-Lizenz CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.