Peter Handke Notebooks

The notebooks of Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Peter Handke form a significant, yet unpublished body of work. In a long-term cooperative project between the Austrian National Library and the German Literature Archive Marbach, all 75 notebooks created up to 1990 will be published for the first time in a commented digital edition and made freely accessible. All research data will be archived for the long term and made available for reuse and research.

The notebooks are Handke's most important working tool, used to prepare his works or to record his readings and travels. Starting in 1976, he began capturing a "reportage" of all kinds of "consciousness events" in his daily notes, experimenting with new aesthetic techniques that led to a shift in his poetics. This consistent note-taking, which also includes drawings, makes the notebooks unique documents and indispensable sources for Handke research. Seventy-five notebooks from the period between 1971 and 1990, comprising a total of 10,900 densely written pages, are already accessible in public archives.

Edition project

The digital edition project "Peter Handke: Notebooks" is led by PD Dr. Bernhard Fetz and Dr. Ulrich von Bülow. It is being developed by a seven-member team from the Literature Archive and the Department of Research and Data Services of the Austrian National Library, as well as the German Literature Archive Marbach, under the editorial direction of Mag. Katharina Pektor.

The digital edition includes the publication of all 75 notebooks on the edition website https://edition.onb.ac.at/handke-notizbuecher (open access). It is hosted and archived within the Sustainable Infrastructure for Digital Editions at the Austrian National Library. The edition project is designed as a three-part long-term endeavor: 

1. Project Phase 1 involves setting up the edition website, developing the edition concepts, and editing 22 notebooks from the period 1976 to 1979. These notebooks accompany Handke's practice in journal writing as well as the development of his film narrative "The Left-Handed Woman" and the major work complex "Slow Homecoming." Phase 1 will be conducted from 2021 to 2024 within the projects I 4708 (FWF) and 435049492 (DFG) .
2. Project Phase 2 focuses on the subsequent 26 notebooks up to 1987 which document the creation of another ten works, three films, and the beginning of Handke's work as a translator from American English, Slovenian, French, and Ancient Greek. 
3. Project Phase 3 will publish the early notebooks up to 1976, in which Handke used a different technique of note-taking, as well as the notebooks from the years 1987 to 1990, which the author carried with him on his nearly three-year world tour. 

The notebooks will be made available according to current editorial standards as philologically verified texts that are easy to read and cite and can be cross-checked with the facsimile. They will include brief commentary and indexing and will be presented in a synoptic view of facsimile, annotated diplomatic transcription, edited reading version, and TEI-XML view. Comprehensive overview comments will provide quick insights into the content and material, allowing thematic access to the individual notebooks. The mediation and indexing offerings will be continuously expanded during the project phases and supplemented with new content and itineraries, such as a search function or the visualization of travel routes. 

Methods

The workflow combines classical and digital editing methods: editing concepts, features, and tools are developed and validated by the entire team in an agile manner. The texts are transcribed in Transkribus , with machine support such as Handwritten Text Recognition, Named Entity Recognition or Text Mining being utilized starting from the second project phase. Subsequently, the documents are encoded in TEI-XML according to current coding standards using the OxygenEditor and enriched with authority data (GND, VIAF, Wikidata). The TEI documents are versioned and stored via GitLab and integrated into the edition platform. 

Innovation

The first publication of the notebooks is a prerequisite for the thorough analysis and interpretation of Handke's work. It enables new questions and insights regarding his poetics, the intertextuality of his writing, and his specific working methods and the genesis of his works. In terms of coding and visualization, new approaches are being sought based on standards and innovative digital humanities research methods, for example, in dealing with drawings, work-genetically relevant data, or location data.