Format: ORAL

Sarah T. Wagner1, Frank Mller1, Lena Frenzke1, Thomas Ruhland2

1 Chair of Botany, Dresden University of Technology 2 Interdisciplinary Centre for Pietism Research, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

The Herbarium Dresdense (DR), Germany, houses about 500.000 specimens of worldwide origin. One of the oldest and most valuable collections is the Herbarium Barbiense of the Moravian Church (in German: Herrnhuter Brdergemeine) from the mid to the late 18th century. On their mission to spread Christianity, the Moravians settled on many continents and took the advantage of exploring culture and nature of their new home countries. Being excellent observers and documentarists, they left a barely explored corpus of objects and texts of tremendous importance for natural sciences and humanities. A current project, which uses Digital Humanities methods, aims to identify the historical contexts of their herbarium collections, i.e. through personal correspondences, itineraries, botanical manuscripts, and publications to reconstruct the names of the individual collectors, to clarify their manifold contributions to botany and finally to create an overview of their influence on the development of modern natural sciences. The scientific heritage of the Moravian Church members demonstrates that they were strongly integrated into the scientific community of the 18th and 19th century. Letters in the collections of the Linnean Society show, that they were in close contact with leading scientists, e.g. Carl v. Linn, discussing issues on plant taxonomy, exchanging specimens and presenting own fieldworks and floras. Using methods of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Normed Data and Linked (Open) Data, we want to contextualise herbarium specimens, which often lack detailed collection information, with associated archive material (e.g. flora manuscripts, plant lists, field books) in order to enrich the specimens with botanical metadata and thus make them usable for research. First results will be presented in our contribution.