Stefan George Digital 
Frederike Neuber
The typographical dress of literature shapes our understanding and interpretation of the text, especially when it is such an integral part of poetry as in the literary work of Stefan George (1868–1933). At the end of the 19th century, in times of industrialization of the book market, George put special emphasis on the typographic design of his works, which is either simple or splendid, but always intentional. Thus, design features such as format or layout can have an impact on the literary dimension of the works. In addition, the individualized St-G-typeface, a sans serif typeface which is based on George’s handwriting and historical scripts, is an exceptional phenomenon in literary history. Its versions, form repertoire and textual function have not yet been researched enough.
With Stefan George Digital (StGD) a selection of historical prints of George’s poetical works has been edited for the first time and is now available online for further exploration. StGD has been developed as a prototype of a ‘typography-centered edition’ within the editor’s dissertation at the Centre for Information Modelling at the University of Graz and the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network DiXiT (funded 2013 –2017 under Marie Curie Actions within the European Commission’s 7th Framework).
The focus of StGD is the editorial enrichment of information on typography in general and on microtypography in particular, i.e. of the design and use of typefaces and fonts. Currently, StGD includes 25 printed editions of George’s poetical works published between 1897 and 1922. The single works are represented in the corpus variable numbers of times according to their typographical variation. All sources are enriched by bibliographical metadata and digital facsimiles. Four typographical versions of “Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel“ (1899–1932) are available as edited full texts and with regard to their typographical variance at line level. In addition, all sources are enhanced by descriptions of the applied fonts based on a description ontology that has been developed for this purpose. This ontology also lays the foundation for the microtypographical inventory, which is part of the edition and a research tool itself. It offers three exploration modes: the type repertoire (Typenrepertoire), e.g. to retrace the genesis of the St-G-typeface, the form repertoire (Formenrepertoire), e.g. to observe the transmission of design features between typefaces, and the typeset repertoire (Satzrepertoire), e.g. to explore the application of fonts in certain text contexts.
The technical ecosystem of StGD is the FEDORA-based asset management system GAMS (Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management System) that guarantees long-term archiving. The digital images are provided via IIIF in several viewers (Mirador and Open Seadragon), bibliographical metadata and texts are encoded in XML/TEI. The type descriptions are based on an ontology in RDF/OWL. Since the latter is documented and can be referenced via stable URIs, it can be further used as a Semantic Web resource to be implemented in other projects as well.
References:
- DiXiT-Website: http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/ (accessed 1.2.2020)
- Kurz, Stephan. 2007. Der Teppich der Schrift. Typografie bei Stefan George. Frankfurt am Main/Basel: Stroemfeld.
- Lucius, Wolf D. von. 2012. “Buchgestaltung und Typographie bei Stefan George.” In Stefan George und sein Kreis. Ein Handbuch, edited by Achim Aurnhammer et al. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. 467–91.
- Neuber, Frederike. 2020. Das Konzept einer typografiezentrierten digitalen Edition der Werke Stefan Georges samt einem Modell zur Beschreibung von Mikrotypografie. Dissertation, Cologne: University of Cologne.
- Neuber, Frederike 2017. “Typografie und Varianz in Stefan Georges Werk. Konzeptionelle Überlegungen zu einer ‘typografiekritischen’ Edition.” In Editio, edited by Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth and Bodo Plachta. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.