FactGrid:Gotha Illuminati Research Base Team
The Gotha Illuminati Research Base is a project of Erfurt University's Gotha Research Centre. The Database with its network of document pages with transcripts and commentary began as a regular MediaWiki in the DFG funded project "Illuminati Essays" conducted by Markus Meumann and Olaf Simons under the supervision of Martin Mulsow Martin Mulsow. The original platform was extremely successful with all its constraints — it could only speak German, all information cam in a tedious manual arrangement. Yet we were delighted that the pages quickly inspired the entire community of Illuminati research to join. Everyone doing work in the field contacted us with the wish to have accounts on the platform. Hermann Schüttler gave this platform a central structure with pages he created for all the members he had previously documented in his Die Mitglieder des Illuminatenordens, 1776-1787/93 (Munich, 1991). He also offered us a hard disc drive which we could not that easily digest: Its central content was an Access database with information on all the letters he had been cataloguing in the Halle project on the Illuminati correspondence in which he had been working with Reinhard Markner under the supervision of Monika Neugebauer-Wölk. There was no good solution to present this treasure in a regular Wiki. Gotha's Illuminati ended in 2016 and left us with a general consensus that the "Research Base" needed a database solution which would work with a conventional Wiki. Wikimedia Germany was ready to support us with the implementation of one of the first Wikibase instances outside Wikidata. The Gotha Illuminati Research in to the FactGrid, the wikibase platform we could now open to historical research with far greater openness. We are presently working on a new phase of Illuminati research that will aim at the entire archival documentation of the organisation of the 1770s and 1780s. The Gotha Illuminati Research Base is on the new platform still a provisional project. The software comes without the user friendly interface we should like to offer. Much of our work has to be presented in SPARQL queries – to the delight of data miners but to the horror of anyone who would rather access an organised arrangement of web pages. We are aware of the problem and we know we need a designed interface to offer easy access to the materials. The project's main page — The Gotha Illuminati Research Base — offers overviews and sample searches. Our transcripts are open to the full text search above. If you have questions concerning the project or the present web application do not hesitate to contact the technical supervisor Dr. Olaf Simons Projects and Participants
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