The long-term Academy project Travelling Humboldt–Science on the Move publishes the American, Russian-Siberian and European Travel Journals of the Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). The journals are accompanied by thematically related letters from his world-spanning correspondence network as well as manuscripts from his vast legacy collection, many of which have not been published before.

Up to now, we have delivered eight subsequent versions of this digital, documentary edition. The TEI/XML subset of the ehd has been developed by adopting established TEI subsets, e.g. the German Text Archive’s Base Format for Manuscripts, to ensure the highest possible degree of standardisation, re-usability, and interoperability of the data. The comprehensive transcription and encoding guidelines illustrate the specifications of the ehd’s TEI format. The publication strategy is ‘digital first’, and the text-critical documentary edition can be fully accessed open access under a Creative Commons license.

Following version 8 of the ehd (published in May 2022), we now fulfil the promise to deliver Humboldt’s complex handwritten and hard-to-decipher texts as free-licensed TEI-XML data by making available (1) the annotated text transcriptions of more than 500 documents (ca. 2.800 pages), (2) the comprehensive Alexander von Humboldt Chronology with about 1.600 individual, dated statements from Humboldt’s almost 90-year lifespan, and (3) about 18.000 index entries.

The presentation focuses on this digital data publication, and illustrates our approach between re-using existing data and best practices on the one hand, and giving back to the wider (TEI) community on the other hand.