Transcriptions

The unique character of digitalHusserl resides in its disaggregated archival format. Rather than the linear and highly edited print format of Husserl’s writings, digitalHusserl will preserve, organize, and present Husserl’s writings in a non-linear manifold of searchable texts: scholars will be able to develop their own research strategies, each thus creating a ‘virtual edition’ of Husserl’s writings. digitalHusserl will make possible multiple readings, by means of rearranging the pages of the manuscript according to different orders (what we call ‘manuscript collection’). This way of reading, which is not possible in a linear printed edition, actually approximates more faithfully the way in which Husserl himself wrote, read, and organized his thoughts.

Since Husserl wrote in a special form of stenography (called ‘Gabelsberger’), the availability of  transcriptions in a digital form is crucial to fulfil the open access commitment of the Husserl Archives. digitalHusserl will make available to registered users both the facsimiles of the paper transcriptions that since 1938 have been made by the transcribers and editors of the Husserl Archives as well as verified and searchable digital transcriptions.   

In order to test the transcription workflow of a digital born ‘manuscript collection’ we relied on the edition of Husserl's lecture course “Einleitung in die Phänomenologie” of 1912. This is a relatively short text, which was not yet published and that needed to be reconstructed because its material textual basis is scattered in different manuscript folders. The edition of this text functioned as the pilot project to design the infrastructure of digitalHusserl. The pilot project was firstly edited according to the editorial standard of the Husserliana Materialien series, i.e. as a normalized transcription (so called letzter Hand edition) with minimal textual apparatus.

The archival aim of digitalHusserl of offering a complete as possible textual documentary basis for transcription is from the start entangled with interpretative choices required from the transcribers. It is thus impossible to offer transcriptions that are absolutely ‘neutral’ in the sense of being presentable entirely independently from such editorial choices (note that, from a technical point of view, this excludes the possibility to work with stand-off markup). It is thus all the more important to offer (at least, as much as resources allow, in an exemplary fashion for selected manuscripts) transcriptions in an accountable and amendable manner.

This can in principle help also non-expert readers of Gabelsberger shorthand to follow the original stenographic text by reading the transcription side by side. This explains the display chosen for the pilot project. In this respect, the most accountable way will be to offer not only a normalized but also a diplomatic transcription. A diplomatic transcription aims to provide a faithful documentation of the original while it also makes transparent the various editorial decisions.We are currently setting the editorial guidelines for the TEI-encoding of digital transcriptions. In a further step, depending on interest, we further plan to offer some tutorials and help-tools for acquiring and improving skills at reading of Husserl’s shorthand.