Digital resources: Blogs

As part of the project "Cartographies of Africa and Asia (1800-1945). A Project for the Digitization of Maps of the Perthes Collection Gotha" (KarAfAs), over 35,000 maps of Africa and Asia from the Perthes Collection dating from 1800 to 1945 were digitised and prepared for the (specialist) public. To accompany the digitisation project, a project blog was launched under the direction of Dr Claudia Berger to document outstanding finds and the initial results of the indexing process.

The project and digitisation were successfully completed at the beginning of 2023. However, research into the Gotha Perthes Collection's maps of Africa and Asia continues. In order to make this work visible, the blog has been continued since 2024 under the new editorship of Albert Feierabend and Florian Balbiani at the Centre for Transcultural Studies. The blog not only documents the completed research and digitisation project, but above all serves as a platform to provide insights into ongoing research. In this context, it offers scholars researching in Gotha – in particular the scholarship holders of the Herzog Ernst and Job Ludolf Scholarship Programme – the opportunity to publish and discuss primary sources, research data and ongoing studies from their research stay in Gotha.

The latest blog posts:

• Müller, Sara, The Black Triangle. German Colonialism in Oceania and the Hunt for Gutta-Percha, in: Mapping Africa and Asia, 18.08.2025, https://karafas.hypotheses.org/8553.
• Feierabend, Albert, Workshop: "The Ethiopian Pillow" - Towards a New Cultural Mapping of Headrests, in: Mapping Africa and Asia, 07.08.2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/14aon.
• Nauheim, Tobit, From Fieldwork in Japan to Print: The Reciprocal Relationship between Johannes Justus Rein and the Perthes Publishing House, in: Mapping Africa and Asia, 01.07.2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/148zf.