Projects

Current projects in the Academies’ Programme

Alevi Archive: Ethnohistory of Alevi Communities in Anatolia, 16th to 20th Centuries

The project researches and documents the historical living environments of Alevi communities in Anatolia from the 16th to the 20th century.

Innenraum eines Mausolems, grüne Wände, Teppiche auf dem Boden und ein Teppich an der Wand, zwei Särge sind mit bunten Tüchern verhüllt.

BACH Research Portal

The BACH Research Portal makes all available archival sources on the entire Bach family of musicians accessible to the public in digital form for the first time.

Johann Sebastian Bach with the Veit-Bach-Mill in the background. Overlay with html code in light grey.

Bibliotheca Arabica

Bibliotheca Arabica explores Arabic literature from the 12th to the 19th century through manuscripts and data on their transmission.

Black-and-white photograph of an old library with ornate arches, bookshelves and cushions on the mosaic floors

Buddhist Murals of Kucha

The project analyses the paintings from Kucha, their narrative content and their significance in the history of art and religion, and make them digitally accessible.

A fragment of a mural depicting a scene from one of the Buddha’s sermons. Three figures can be seen.

Corpus Judaeo-Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti digital

The CJHNTdigital creates a comprehensive digital platform documenting surviving evidence of early Judaism (300 BCE–200 CE) within the Hellenistic-Roman world and scholarly commentaries on selected early Jewish and New Testament texts to illuminate New Testament texts through Greco-Roman influenced Jewish thought.

Etymological dictionary of Old High German

The Etymological Dictionary of Old High German explores the origins and future of all Old High German words and the corresponding lexemes in related languages.

Coloured map of Europe showing the distribution of Indo-Europen languages (in German).

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi Correspondence

The project edits Jacobi's correspondence, which one of the most important exchange of letters around 1800, and his key terminology is additionally explained in a freely available digital dictionary.

Portrait painting of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in contemporary clothing (brown jacket and a white scarf) and hairstyle.

German etymology of semantic fields

The aim of the project is to produce a large scientific etymological dictionary of the German language.

network in form of red and orange lines and bubbles. In the left foreground, there is a form such as a branch in grey.

German Inscriptions of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

The interacademic project “Die Deutschen Inschriften” (German Inscriptions) is dedicated to the recording and annotated edition of preserved and transcribed inscriptions from the German-speaking world up to the year 1650.

Tapestry in colour with Charlemagne sitting on a throne, surrounded by scribes and/or philosophers.

Gottsched Correspondence

An edition of the entire surviving correspondence of Johann Christoph Gottsched and Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched, covering around 900 correspondents and the period from 1722 to 1766

A bookshelf with all the volumes published by 2024.

Leipzig Akkadian Dictionary

With the Leipzig Akkadian Dictionary, a new dictionary of the most important Ancient Near Eastern language, Babylonian-Assyrian (or Akkadian for short), will be created over a period of 17 years.

Books and stone tablets in a digital context

Leipzig Mendelssohn Edition

This historical-critical complete edition makes accessible all compositions, letters, writings and works of art by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847) for research and musical practice.

Sheet music in printed form with handwritten annotations, monochrome photograph

Letters and records of Frederick the Wise and John the Constant

This editorial project documents the ecclesiastical political actions of two key figures in the early history of the Reformation – the two brothers and electors Frederick and John of Saxony – based on written records from the years 1513 to 1532.

Double portrait of the two brothers wearing the sam attire and ring.

Old High German Dictionary

The Old High German Dictionary leads back to the earliest days of German-language tradition (8th to approx. 11th century) fully describing forms and meanings of all recorded words in their German or Latin contexts.

Old and partly damaged parchment with the Our Father prayer Old High German writing.

Propyläen

The long-term interacademic project PROPYLÄEN. Research Platform on Goethe's Biographica invites you to explore Goethe's life and work in a new way—well-founded, networked, and freely accessible.

Robert Schumann’s Poetic World

The project presents Schumann's diverse oeuvre as a composer, writer, and editor for the first time in an interdisciplinary, historical-critical hybrid edition.

Black and white drawing with 29 year old Robert Schumann sitting in a chair. He wears a dark coat with a high collar. On the left bottom there is Kriehuber's signature.

Spener letters edition

The historical-critical edition of Spener's letters provides an important source for in-depth research into the early modern period, particularly its church and theological history.

Black and white portrait of Jakob Spener wearing contemporary attire: a black coat with a broad frill neck collar and a black cap

Structures and transformations of the Egyptian language

This major digital project uses an annotated and freely accessible online text corpus to cover the entire ancient Egyptian-Coptic vocabulary, thus enabling scientific analysis of the linguistic changes in the language with the longest documented written history.

Papyrus with black and red Egyptian-Coptic writing

Current state and third party funded projects

(Semi)-automated topical text classification

SATEK addresses the hitherto lacking thematic indexing of very large text corpora by developing specialised classifications for highly heterogeneous text types and widely varying document sizes.

3-D circle (similiar to a tyre) consisting of data bits depicted in various shapes and colours with horizontal data lines moving through the circle. The background is black.

AWV 2.0

page of a dicitionary with German handwriting (printed) and Hieroglyphs

Bach Repertorium

The Bach Repertory catalogues the verifiable musical works of all members of the widely branched Bach family of musicians and produces scholarly editions of selected works.

Historical black-and-white portrait of a man bearing a similiarity to J.S Bach in 18th century attire and hairstyle. Part of the print artwork is the circular frame with ribbons on its top end. The frame with the ribbons is made to appear as 3D.

NFDI Text+

Text+ is a consortium of the "Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur" (NFDI) that focuses on the provision and use of language- and text-based research data. use of language- and text-based research data.

St Mary at Helfta

The aim of the project is to comprehensively research the history of St Mary at Helfta Monastery and its dense network of relationships with other ecclesiastical institutions and secular rulers for the first time.

The Church at Helfta with a lawn in front and at gate next to the church on the left side of the image

Technological Impact Assessment

The Technology Assessment project examines the opportunities and risks of new scientific and technological developments in the context of sustainability.

The Saxon Weichbild and its gloss

The project aims at producing the first quotable edition of the Saxon Weichbild and its gloss in close cooperation with Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH).

Historical manuscript of the Weichbildvulgata with brown and red ink

Completed projects

Wismut

The 'Landscape as Cultural Heritage' project presents an interactive visualization of the transformation of the Bad Schlema mining landscape in Saxony, drawing upon diverse sources including aerial imagery and remediation documentation.

Wooden sculpture of a smelter at work. There is a meadow and there are trees in the background.

Treatment of dissidents and the consequences: a data-based analysis of the SED's policy towards construction soldiers

The project investigated the influence of so-called "construction soldiers" on opposition networks in the GDR using innovative digital research methods.

A statue of a muscular naked man hammering on a sword. The image is in the style of social realism.

Schumann letter edition series 2

The Schumann Letter Edition (Series II: Artists' Correspondence) published the approximately 12,000 letters written by the musician couple Robert and Clara Schumann to friends and fellow artists in book form and in the Schumann Letter Database.

black and white daguerrotype portrait of Robert and Clara Schumann, sitting next to each other. Robert looks at the camera, Clara does not.

GDR Dance

Using digital methods, the project explores the cultural heritage of dance in the GDR and develops new ways of analysing, networking and communicating historical events.

Poster mostly in black with orange title and white print depicting an abstract image of dancers swirling around with raised arms

Encyclopdia of Jewish cultures

This project comprehensively covered and documented the modern history of the Jews (1750–1950) in a 7-volume encyclopedia and fundamental source editions.

DIKUSA

The joint project ‘DIKUSA’ develops a digital infrastructure to make cultural data from archives and collections of Saxon research institutions visible, interconnected and reusable.

Church practice in the GDR

The project developed a digital portal for researching and communicating church practices in the GDR, taking into account historical and current social challenges.

List of all completed projects

You may find all completed projects on our German project website ("Beendete Projekte").