The project establishes a co-operative network and creates a representative digital collection of already edited and printed 18th-century letters. As an infrastructure project in the DFG funding program “Digitisation and Indexing”, PDB18 does not itself pursue a research question of its own, but will enable research on epistolary exchange in the 18th century using digital methods (network analysis, text mining etc.) by providing comprehensive data sets of metadata and full texts. Full abstract: https://teimec2023.uni-paderborn.de/contributions/152.html