Digital Peirce Archive

The Digital Peirce Archive aims at designing and implementing an image-based archiving repository of the Nachlass of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914). The archive will assemble around 100,000 manuscript pages that span more than five decades, and touch on very different disciplinary domains. With an eye to improving the methodology of investigation of Peirce’s intellectual legacy, the archive will set up a citable research environment to search, filter, describe, comment, link, compare, share, export, edit, and browse the manuscript pages, using the metadata management software imeji. Making available online such a large sample of the papers will also enable users to custom-modify their configuration according to different criteria or ordering schemes, unhampered by geographical distance or preservation concerns. In this way, the Digital Peirce Archive intends to put the potentialities of shared expertise and information to the service of Peirce studies. Beyond this, however, it also seeks to foster the debate on the relevance of non-textual material to historical-philosophical studies, and more generally, on the theoretical significance of visual thinking (bildnerisches Denken). This latter goal has its roots in the studies of philosopher John Michael Krois (the project’s initiator), who first pointed to Peirce’s extraordinary relevance to a philosophical study of images.

Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeit: Franz Engel, Moritz Queisner, Tullio Viola

Technische Mitarbeit: Karsten Asshauer, Jörg Busse