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Mission

The goal of Husserl.net is to facilitate Husserl scholarship using the methods of digital humanities. This website was not built in coordination with the Archives, but is pursuing the same vision. As Thomas Vongehr puts it in his 2007 essay on the History of the Husserl-Archives:

In the foreseeable future, an electronically searchable version of the published Nachlass texts will become an important research tool, used to orient oneself within the extensive Husserliana series. Such an electronic resource would effectively replace a printed index ot the Husserliana, which is a project that the Husserl Archives have often considered. It is already possible to search the index of Husserl's manuscript titles online on the Archive's website.

The primary tool provided by the website is a searchable database of keyword occurrences in the Husserliana series, the official editions of Husserl's writings produced by the Husserl archives. Each of a list of keywords is associated with a list of Husserliana volumes, ordered by number of occurrences, but sortable in multiple ways. This provides a way to study which volumes emphasize which concepts. Since volumes are associated with years, it also provides a way to study when Husserl emphasized certain concepts. In most cases, actual page references are also provided. The data is derived from an earlier database produced in Japan (see History). The pages for the Husserliana volumes have convenient links to pdfs at the website ophen.org, with the laudable mission of providing "open access to the entire corpus of phenomenology, and to build a shared, collaborative digital working environment for the phenomenological researchers around the world." The Husserliana pages also have some images and commentary.

We have plans to enhance the site in a few ways, in particular by providing convenient links from keywrods to entries at Husserl.hu and the Glossary-Guide for Translating Husserl. Thus the page is intended as a convenient hub linking different existing digital approaches to Husserl scholarship. We have vague plans for other content, like timelines, graphical depictions of occurrence counts, use of bibliometric methods, etc.

History

This site was originally created by Jeff Yoshimi in the early aughts when he was a postdoc at UCSD. The original goal was to build a web-interface for the results of a Japanese project. The website for that project is no longer available, but information can be found on the wayback machine. A team in Japan searched 17 volumes of the Husserliana volumes in the 1990s and released the results as occurrence counts and lists of page references on an FTP server. I downloaded this information and, with the permission of members of the Japanese team, released them here. Even today, easy access to the Japanese database's results is the primary service offered here.

The original site also had a database of secondary scholarship on Husserl, and provided an ability to add comments to any book, as well as to concepts associated with Husserl's work. As time went on, other services emerged that made it much easier to find this information, so I began to question whether to keep the site going. Moreover, with the emergence of ophen.org and Husserl.hu, which do much of what I had wanted to do, I almost retired the website in 2021. However, a few things happened.

  • Rodney Parker got in touch with me about possible collaborations. In talking to him I realized there was still a role for the site in providing a simple, clean way to organize information about Husserliana and keywords, with links to other sites like ophen.org, which he co-created.
  • I had been working regularly on another project, Simbrain, with a full-stack web programmer, Yulin Li, and realized that with his help, it would not be too much work to clean up the site, retain its core features, and provide a few new features.

Thus, I decided to revamp the site in 2022, removing out-dated features, and simplifying its scope. At the same time, we expanded the site in a few ways:

  • We re-created the entire site using modern tools like Bootstrap and a template engine.
  • We scraped the original Japanese data for page references, which is now available for some titles by clicking the occurrence count number in the serach results
  • All lists are presented with a custom display that allows ordering by primary, secondary, etc. columns.
  • All German characters are now shown in their normal format, rather than in the custom ASCII encoding of the original data.
  • The original list of keywords has been organized into a separate page.

One thing that emerged from this was a renewed appreciation for the old Japanese site. By selecting a list of keywords, they made an extensive list of philosophically important terms in Husserl. Ideas for the future of this site include providing pages for these keywords, associated with links to other resources and user comments (a resurrection and refinement of the old "concept database").

Search Results

The search function searches the list of keywords and presents the results, ordered by occurrence.

Key features

  • Fragments of words can be searched for. Example: akt returns results from multiple keywords, inculing charakter* and aktuell*
  • The * symbol indicates a wildcard in the original search.
  • Column headings in the search results can be clicked to make them ascending or descending, and multiple headings can be selected. When multiple columns are selected their sort priority is shown.
  • In the original data, results were searched for with either lower case or capital first letter, with the sole exception of Ich and ich, which were separately searched for.
  • Page references are available in search results by clicking on occurrence counts. But note that the resulting lists are incomplete in two ways.
    1. Page references are not available for the main text in Husserliana 6, 7, 8, 18, and 19 (references are available for footnotes and editors' introductions)
    2. Our scrape of the data was not always complete, so occurrence counts do not always match the page references perfectly. The occurrence counts are definitive.
  • The list of Husserliana originally searched are listed at the top of the list of keywords page.

Providing Comments

The button for providing comments has been removed. We can, however, still add comments about Husserliana volumes. For now just email me and I can add it manually.

Credits

Designed and created by Jeff Yoshimi. Ioan Muntean wrote the initial implementation of the site. Additional help was provided by Kyle Baron. The original icons were designed by David Fleischmann. Graphics suggestions were provided by Pippin Schupbach, Patrick Reagh, Elizabeth Reagh, and my parents (Toshi and Kathy Yoshimi). Web hosting and technical support provided by Matthew Lloyd. Denice Sawatzky was a great help with interlibrary loan. Special thanks to Mason Withers, Eleanor Reagh, Shinji Hamazu, and the Japanese Husserl Database team. In 2013 Lam Nguyen helped with revisions and validations of the search feature. Yulin Li completely rewrote the site in 2021-2022.

Contact

Comments, corrections, and source material of any kind (including pictures) to jeffyoshimi-at-yahoo.com.