At the beginning of the project, all team members had to become familiarized with the relevant secondary literature. Additionally, we gained a reasonable overview of the periodical markets in various geographic contexts (the German, French, English, and Spanish-speaking worlds) and selected relevant sources in light of the project's objectives and individual work packages. As some of the researchers had been working with the PI on related issues before, there was a good foundation for quickly starting with the first publications. Already a year after the project started, we published the bilingual volume Skizzen, Romane, Karikaturen. Populäre Genres als soziographische Wissensformate im 19. Jahrhundert. In this volume, the research team investigates how different genres on the commercialized print market (e.g. caricature, photography, urban sketches) produced ethnographic and sociological knowledge for a broad audience in diverse geographical contexts. The volume was complemented by scholarly articles from researchers from other institutions (University of Bergen and University of Vienna), which look at the representational features of early Costa Rican periodicals and pictures and descriptions of Viennese “folk types”.
In June 2022, we organized an international conference titled "Ethnography, Folklore, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture,” which brought together researchers from different fields who contribute to new perspectives on the history of social study by connecting the print revolution with the development of social thought and study. We were happy to welcome speakers from diverse disciplines (Hispanic Literature, French Literature, History, German Philology, Cultural Anthropology) and from all over Europe (University of Brest, Oxford University, University of Tartu, University of Bergen, Free University Bozen) and the US (University of Texas at Austin). In the talks and subsequent discussions, we were able to reveal various alternative contexts and strands of early social knowledge production and open perspectives for a history of social knowledge beyond disciplinary, national, and genre-related methodologies. We are currently organizing the edition of a conference volume based on the talks and discussions.
Other major outcomes are articles in renowned journals such as Nineteenth-Century Contexts (Routledge), Nineteenth-Century Literature (University of California Press), and the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies (Routledge).
