The FactGrid (still lacking a unique design) has, over the last six weeks, just received its first project data – data from Halle’s and Gotha’s Illuminati research of the last 20 years, which I will briefly outline in the following. Some of the datasets are still lacking the complexity we are aiming at, others have gained greater depth:
We are presently listing 2,000 people, about 1,350 of whom have been Illuminati members in the 1780s; the rest are mostly people mentioned in the correspondences which we are trying to map. We are hesitating here with the far more complex biographical input which he have in store, since this would be better done in joint ventures with the GNDand with Katrin Möller, university of Halle, who has become the leading expert on 18th-century careers and professions. We are negotiating in both directions. Our roughly 2,000 titles of research on the Illuminati come in equally rudimentary sets. Again, we have realized that it would be more interesting to base this work on library catalogue norms from the outset.
But we are quite detailed with the more than 9,000 documents currently associated with the original Illuminati: documents that survived with the publications of Illuminati documents by the Bavarian state of 1786 and 1787 and with the archives of Adam Weishaupt, Johann Joachim Christoph Bode, of Gotha’s first lodge “The Compass”, and of Ernest II of Saxony-Gotha-Altenburg.
[...]