Reading Traces is a research cooperation between the UCLAB and the Theodor Fontane Archive Potsdam. The project aims to investigate explorative approaches to knowledge acquisition and representation in the digital space and to develop a novel graphical user interface for the exploration of Theodor Fontane’s digitized reference library across multiple scales.
The physical library, located at the Theodor Fontane Archive, contains over 150 books. In light of the large, although by the reference library to some extent limited, data space this project not only poses questions concerning the visual exploration of the data across multiple scales (individual traces, pages, books, and the whole collection), but also the contextualization of Fontane and his reading habits. In an interdisciplinary collaboration with the Theodor Fontane Archive, these questions are substantiated and put into a cultural-philosophical context.
What did Theodor Fontane read? And how did he read?
Theodor Fontane is considered to be one of the most important German realist authors of the 19th century. His personal library comprises 155 volumes with in total approximately 64,000 pages, a collection of books from his possession which is now preserved in the »Theodor Fontane Archiv« in Potsdam. The significance of this collection is based on its provenance: Fontane himself held the books in his hands and worked with them. Because of the numerous marginalia and markings he made during the reading and the many dedication copies of friends, colleagues and his family, this collection is of irreplaceable value.
The preserved volumes show a variety of traces of reading and usage, such as comments, ratings, text corrections, markings, institutional stamps, fingerprints or glued-in newspaper articles. The aim of the project is to make the reading traces on the 64,000 pages accessible to the public for the first time by providing visual access through an interactive visualization, which conveys the material in an explorative way, opening up new possibilities for the continuous research practice on Fontane.

In the final prototype, the data, the marginalia, and the digitized pages can be explored via two modes, each one consisting of multiple granularity levels to help explore the data from different perspectives. While the first mode (start page) arranges and visualizes the distribution of reading traces along the linear reading order of the books, the second mode displays books and authors based on similarity measures (multidimensional scaling) of quantitative occurrences of reading traces. By scrolling up/down or by using the navigation bar at the left side, it’s possible to gradually navigate between different granularity levels of the data (author level, book level, page level).
This project is a research collaboration with the Theodor-Fontane-Archiv.