“Johann Friedrich Blumenbach – online” is a long-term project financed by the Union of German Academies of Sciences and is based at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities (http://www.blumenbach-online.de).

The project entails, among other things, an internet edition of Blumenbach’s published writings including translations and reissues, enriched by digital images from objects of natural history.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) was Professor of Medicine and Natural History at the University of Göttingen. One of the leading exponents of the revolutionary change of the geo-biological concept of the world at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, his long life bridged the biology of Carl von Linné on the one hand and Charles Darwin on the other.

In his famous classification of human varieties, Blumenbach coined the term “caucasian” which is used today in the English-speaking parts of the world to denominate Europeans and light-skinned people. From the mid-19th century onward, Blumenbach was misunderstood as fathering the idea of scientific racism, when in fact he urged for the unity of humankind, thus becoming the founder of scientific anti-racism.

The presentation will give an overview of the challenges the electronic editing of an 18th-century, multi-lingual, multi-topic, multi-media corpus poses. Important decisions need to be made in advance as well as along the way, concerning e. g. a) the implementation of standards to ensure interchangeability, b) the level of markup required to yield high quality results and keep the texts reusable in new/different scientific setups, c) connecting the findings to the encyclopaedic knowledgebase of the internet. The constraints ensuing from this concept will be addressed as well, for example the limitations of using ID-numbers from an online-thesaurus opposed to the freedom of formulation possible in traditional editing practice.

The presentation will show how only an electronic edition can render a detailed and visualisable analysis of the structure of Blumenbach’s work, making evident the evolution and dissemination of ideas and texts over time and generating new avenues for future inter- and multi-disciplinary (history of science, anthropology, zoology, botany, geology, chemistry, archaeology, ethnology, philosophy, history, etc.) research.