ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Bridging Botany – The Edition of Haller’s Swiss flora on République des Lettres as a Cross-Disciplinary Resource

• In Event: The Impact of the Digital Revolution on the History of Science and its Social Implications-2

English Abstract

République des Lettres is a research-driven collaborative platform designed to reveal the manifold transnational knowledge spaces and scholarly practices of the early modern period. It unites projects that share a thematic focus and examine historical knowledge resources and their production practices. Building on a continuously evolving technical infrastructure, the platform provides an interlinked framework for both text and data editions. The data edition of Albrecht von Haller’s internationally recognised and fundamental publication on the Swiss flora (1742/68) illustrates the potential of this approach. In this work, Haller combined the results of his observation and collection with the systematic analysis of botanical literature. This long-term endeavour was closely connected to his extensive practice as a reviewer, which kept him abreast of ongoing research, and unfolded alongside the bibliographical efforts he compiled in his Bibliotheca Botanica (1771/72). Haller’s research also had a strongly collaborative character, drawing on books, specimen reports and plant shipments from his wide-ranging correspondence network. Through this interplay of observation,collaborative input and bibliographical research, he consolidated knowledge on the Swiss flora
and situated it in an international scholarly context.
The data edition of Haller’s Swiss flora reveals these multiple layers of knowledge production through the source-critical preparation of the diverse material. It also enriches the edition by linking specific references to Linnaean nomenclature and to modern authority data on plants and localities. The result is a curated dataset that bridges early herbaria and flora traditions with modern botany, opening a space in which historical, contemporary and digital worlds of scientific practice intersect and supporting both knowledge-historical and scientific research. République des Lettres plays a crucial mediating role in this process by transforming the collected material into sustainable research data and enabling its cross-disciplinary reuse.

Author

• Lukas Heinzmann, University of Bern