Johanna Spyri: Digitale Edition der Erstausgaben
The digital edition of the first editions of Johanna Spyri’s works brings together, for the first time, all of the Swiss author’s stories and novels and makes them accessible in one place. Until now, Spyri’s authorized texts have only been available in contemporary editions within special collections or through antiquarian sources, while later editions sometimes differ significantly from the original text.
The digital complete edition provides the foundation for scholarly engagement with Johanna Spyri’s work. Examining Spyri’s writings from a contemporary perspective offers numerous points of departure, both through the application of new methodological approaches in the Digital Humanities and from the viewpoint of emerging trends in literary studies. The digital edition invites readers to discover Spyri’s extensive body of work, which—apart from the great success of the novel “Heidi”—has largely fallen into obscurity.
Technical Tools
- E-Rara (platform for digitized first editions)
- Transkribus (creation of the raw text, correction of text and layout, annotation using a project-specific custom tag set)
- Python scripts (transformation from Page XML to TEI XML)
- TEI Publisher (frontend)
- GitLab and GitHub Desktop (version control)
Usage Options
This digital edition is aimed both at academic research and at the general public, who wish to rediscover the work of Switzerland’s most successful author and engage with it in the lead-up to the 2027 anniversary. At its core is the provision of a character-faithful reading text that reproduces the original as accurately as possible, thereby serving as a reliable basis for reading, citation, and scholarly reuse. Specially developed indexes enable diverse access to Johanna Spyri’s work. All texts are encoded according to the TEI/XML standard, making them accessible for annotation and further research. The text encoding follows the transcription guidelines of the German Text Archive (DTA). The edition is being developed in close collaboration with the research community.