Digital Archive Barbara Frischmuth

Barbara Frischmuth is one of the most important contemporary Austrian authors. A large part of her premortem bequest is already housed at the Franz Nabl Institute for Literary Research in Graz and, to a lesser extent, at the Austrian National Library and the Adolf Haslinger Literature Foundation, Literature Archive Salzburg. The goal of the project Digital Archive Barbara Frischmuth, which is multi- perspectival in nature and aims at complete mapping of the entire oeuvre, is to enable a broad and at the same time profound scholarly examination of Frischmuth`s oeuvre and thus to provide central impulses both for the professional world and for a larger public. The scope of the undertaking includes the consolidation of the archival holdings, the documentation and comprehensive philological description of both the primary sources and their academic and journalistic reception. The analysis and commentary of the project will be carried out along specific questions and parameters, such as subjects and themes, genre-specific classifications, relevant cultural, aesthetic, or sociopolitical references, or characteristic trends of reception. Academic and journalistic reception is examined both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results of the reception and primary text analysis will be linked and systematically correlated in the digital setting. The digital workflow provides for an online repository with an intuitive and data- driven interface. The entire indexing process is based on proven methods of the Digital Humanities, which allow the diverse information on Frischmuth`s work to be recorded in a structured and standards-compliant manner. Both the workflow of data acquisition and the analysis and presentation of the data are developed and carried out together with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, Vienna. Located at the intersection of archive and German philology, the project`s multi- layered approach not only makes a significant contribution to scholarly research on Frischmuth`s work, but also establishes an exemplary, innovative, and original open- access system for capturing, structuring, and indexing literary texts and their reception. In addition, the project provides a content-related basis for possible follow-up projects, such as the digitization of the premortem bequests material or edition philological undertakings. To ensure the quality of the project, renowned literary scholars together with experts from ACDH-CH form the project team, i.e. Anna Babka, Peter Clar, Vanessa Hannesschläger, Julia Lingl and Matthias Schmidt.