MUSIL ONLINE - Interdiscursive Commentary

1) Title: MUSIL ONLINE An Interdiscursive Annotation 2) Aim: The project aims to develop an innovative commentary and a specifically designed mode for interdiscursive annotation, thus meeting the main desiderata of research on Robert Musil today and of commentary research in general. 3) Hypotheses: The writings of Robert Musil (1880-1942) are considered as one of the most important literary interpretations of European civilization during the first half of the 20th century, taking into account its various processes of progress, crisis, and decline. Being part of Austrias immaterial cultural heritage and by this virtue also of the collective global cultural memory, Musils work will be made openly accessible on MUSIL ONLINE. This open internet resource requires at the same time a coherent, thorough-going commentary which pays attention to its multiple layers of meaning, bringing these into a dialogue with one another by rendering their respective scientific, philosophical, cultural and political backgrounds. The only way to do so consists in creating a new form of interdiscursive annotation within an interactive, dynamic digital surrounding, enabling the future user to develop his/her individual access to Musil by allowing him/her to switch on and off several aspects of the online presentation of both the text and virtually all of its dimensions. 4) Methods: First, the existing annotations and commentaries to Musils various writings will be examined as to their pertinent contribution to understanding the authors intentions and role in the context of his time. The annotational structure of the digital edition of Musils work as given in the Klagenfurt Edition of 2009 will be digitalized and embedded in the online presentation. Second, the nature of an interdiscursive commentary on Musil will be developed from scratch insofar as the new possibilities and technical facilities of an up-to-date online presentation have to be taken into consideration for the first time. In order to do so, the method called constellation research (Konstellationsforschung) as brought forth by Dieter Henrich et al. will have to be adopted and adapted according to the specific requirements of both a literary corpus of texts and an age as diverse and complicated as the time of Musils main activity between 1900 and 1940. 5) Innovation: While there are several projects that provide an open online access to the writings of an author (including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus), none of them aims at developing an embedded form of coherent interdiscursive annotation as well. Rather, the gap remains between the text in the sense of a more traditional edition on the one hand and the context in the sense of annotations and comments elucidating the former. In contrast, the explicit goal of the present project is to bridge this very gap to the benefit of the reader and user. The present project will provide an essential contribution to the free knowledge exchange between science and society, to the sustainable preservation of Austrias immaterial cultural heritage and, of course, to the global collective memory of humanity.

The aim of the project was to develop a new type of commentary on Robert Musil's work and estate. This new commentary was to take into account both the complexity of this Musil corpus and the heterogeneity of its readers. While this goal was initially content-orientated, it was ultimately realised in a predominantly technical manner. On the basis of literary-philosophical considerations, by means of (university) didactic testing, and evaluation of the knowledge thus gained, the interdiscursive commentary was likewise conceived as part of the corresponding annotation practice, in parallel with the migration of the digital data into the contemporary text markup language XML-TEI. The commentary was integrated into the online edition MUSIL ONLINE (https://edition.onb.ac.at/context:musil) as an independent section called "Understanding". Its prototype was developed in co-operation with the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) and published in their digital edition portal. The continuation of this co-operation between the Robert Musil Institute for Literary Research/Carinthian Literary Archives (RMI/KLA) and the ÖNB was contractually secured. It ensures that the interdiscursive commentary prototypically implemented in this way will be continued indefinitely beyond the duration of the project. The project responds to the wishes and expectations of the scientific community for a contemporary annotation of the highly complex Musil corpus - such as comprehensive and valid information for readers and users, without thereby overloading the edition or overburdening the recipients. According to the key findings of the project, these aims are best fulfilled when, on one hand, the operators of MUSIL ONLINE encode successively all pertinent information at the XML-TEI level by means of continuous expansion, i.e. supplement the data with the corresponding markup elements, and the users, on the other hand, have the possibility of displaying those parts of the XML-TEI level at the presentation or publication level (HTML) they choose. The users are free to enter the edition by one of its three levels: "Reading" for the reading texts, "Viewing" for the documents (facsimiles and transcriptions), and "Understanding" for the commentary. By virtue of the equal status of these three levels, which is characteristic of this project and, as far as can be said, internationally unique, the interdiscursive commentary constitutes a dimension of the edition that is completely at par with both the text and the document and thus enables independent access to it. Therefore, it represents the hoped-for answer to the long-standing research question about the place and function of the commentary in current literary editions, which has been the subject of much discussion in literary studies, edition philology and, not least, text theory and philosophy.