The starting point is the correspondence of the Socinians, people who networked across many European countries and paved the way for the Enlightenment. They emerged from Protestantism, and their followers were active from about 1550 to 1750.

The research project “Religion and Natural Science in Transition: Socinian Correspondence and Unpublished Works in Digital Format” aims to make all surviving Socinian correspondence and other sources digitally accessible and available for scholarly analysis. Led by the Johannes a Lasco Library Foundation, Great Church Emden, the project is being carried out in cooperation with the Academy of Sciences Mainz, the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen (THM). The project is headed by Prof. Dr. Kęstutis Daugirdas from Emden and Prof. Dr. Andreas Kuczera from THM.

Since 2018, researchers have been transcribing the mostly handwritten letters, meaning they are typing them into a digital database. At the same time, they are editing the letters: adding textual and factual commentaries as well as summaries of the content of each letter. In this way, over 2,000 letters have already been digitized and 900 of them have been analyzed in detail in the first research project, "The Socinian Correspondence: Between Theology, Early Modern Natural Science, and Political Correspondence," over the past eight years.

This is where THM and Kuczera come into play, who also works closely with the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. He has not only created a database for historians into which they can enter the texts individually, but thanks to the support of Kuczera and his team, they can also work with a novel graph database.

While traditional digital editions allow users to tag people, places, and things so they can search for these terms, a graph-based digital edition also makes it possible to reveal connections. Information from various fields, such as theology, philosophy, philology, astronomy, and politics, can be displayed in a networked way, like a mind map. "This makes it possible to present complex humanities research data that allows for different interpretations," explains Kuczera.

Editing all the letters and drawings, written in a total of 14 different languages, will take the research team over 20 years. "The past eight years, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), served as a kind of preliminary project. Based on the insights gained, we calculated that we will need 21 years to edit all the sources," explains Prof. Kuczera. Such long-term projects are funded through the Academies Programmeme. They are jointly funded by the federal government and the states. "This also means that, starting in 2026, we will have a full-time position at THMfor the next 21 years to further develop digital editing techniques and adapt them to the needs of historians," Kuczera explains. Currently, Sebastian Enns' doctoral research is linked to the project, which is coordinated through THM and the Research Campus of Central Hessen (FCMH). Enns is the lead computer scientist and responsible for the Webseite and web development. His doctoral research focuses on data modeling in digital editions. Kuczera has linked another project for the digitization of the Socinian letters to his master's thesis. This project will integrate a local artificial intelligence that will answer content-related questions directly based on the edited letters and link to the relevant text passages.

The project webseite is managed by THM and can be accessed at sozinianer.mni.thm.de/home . The site also works in mobile view on smartphones.

The Academies Programmeme and the Union of Academies:

The Academies Programmeme has existed since 1979/80. Within this programmeme, the federal and state governments jointly fund long-term research projects in the humanities and social sciences. With a total budget of approximately 80 million euros, it encompasses 127 projects with around 192 positions (as of 2025).

The programme is coordinated by the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, which unites the eight academies of sciences in Germany. These academies are both learned societies and research institutions. Their members dedicate themselves to long-term, interdisciplinary research projects that contribute to fundamental research in the humanities. These projects include, for example, the creation of scholarly dictionaries, encyclopedias, and critical editions of the complete works of important philosophers and composers, as well as long-term observations at the interface between the natural sciences and the humanities. In doing so, the academies create repositories of knowledge for the future and provide a foundation for the use of the knowledge they have compiled by both the scientific community and the public, as the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities states on its Webseite .