Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma

Alexander von Humboldt is one of the most important and influential scholars in the first half of the 19th century. Belonging to a generation after Georg Forster and a generation before Charles Darwin, his life testifies the immense and borderless interest in every sort of scholarship. This interest is expressed in 17,000 letters to and by Humboldt, written to and by about 3,200 partners. Humboldt’s letters cover the cultural and scientific community of his time: politicians, bankers, poets, journalists, booksellers, philologists, philosophers, geologists, geographers, geodesists, astronomers, mathematicians, and many others. In cooperation with the Forschungsstelle Alexander von Humboldt at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW) and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin plans on exploring Humboldt’s professional and private communication ‘cosmos’. The project will provide data about persons, media, and topics of cultural and scholarly exchange, gain insight into communication strategies of Humboldt’s professional network as well as into knowledge transfer and accumulation in the first half of the 19th century. In the paper, actual explorations and design of the planned web based research project are presented.