History of Literary and Cultural Processes in Tirol

Research project P 14746 History of Literary and Cultural Processes in Tirol Anton UNTERKIRCHER 27.11.2000 The project aims at an historical representation of "Literature in the Tyrol. 1945 -1995" including all documentary, theoretical and practical presuppositions of such a representation. Scientific research into sources is combined with the construction of an ED documentary base, which - in addition to literary remains - makes further relevant material and documents accessible. However, building up this documentary base is not the main goal of the project, but is the necessary prerequisite for preserving empirical data and making it accessible for further research. The novelty in this procedure is that literary history is written on the basis of material from literary archives and that this documentary source material is collected and continually expanded in a data base, which at the same time facilitates an overall presentation of literary history. The innovative quality of this project lies in the combination of doing scientific research and building up a documentary data base in a kind of hermeneutic cycle and in bringing together historic representation and documentary background (via search possibilities) while keeping this background transparent. Thus the complexity of historical development can be taken into account. From the resulting combined representation and documentation valuable experience and new impetus for ED processing of literary sources are gained. An enormous amount of material can be further employed in larger historical research projects such as the writing of a fully documented Austrian literary history. In short, this will make large scale research projects of a hitherto unknown sort possible.