It is possible to follow Humboldt’s footsteps and thinking regarding plants through this digital edition of Humboldt’s Essai sur la géographie des plantes.

This digital and interactive edition is in fact a diplomatic transcription of the 14^th volume that we edited on Twine in order to be able to present online. Twine is, as its tagline reads it, an “open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories”. Thanks to this application, we were able to create a story and inside of this story we implemented our transcription. We gave it the appearance as an online book by working with its HTML and CSS code, before publishing it on the free hosting website Textadventures.

We chose to do a diplomatic transcription of Humboldt’s work and not a modernized one because of the language in which the text was written. Humboldt’s way of writing and the language used are quite easy to follow, as long as the users know some modern French.

The purpose of this digital transcription is to give to the users a direct access to Humboldt’s Essai as his work is at the core of our study. However, instead of setting up a link leading to an already existing online version of the text, we thought it would be better to create our own. That way, we could give the users a more legible version of it than the scanned images already available. We could as well put the emphasis on the interactive aspect of this edition. This interactivity of our transcription involves the readers in their reading, by allowing them to go from one page to another, or to see the content of the footnote, simply clicking on the words at the end of a page or on the footnote in itself. The interactive aspect of our work also allows the users to navigate from this digital object to the other one: the index. If the users wish to obtain more information on a plant mentioned by Humboldt in our digital transcription, they can click on the plant name and they will be redirected to the index. These links point to the corresponding line in the index, so the users don’t have to search through it to find the information they want.

Navigate to the Index