Thematic Resources

As one of the three con­stituent pil­lars of the MIDA research por­tal, the “The­mat­ic Resources” estab­lish con­nec­tions between the MIDA Archival Reflex­i­con and data­base. They present users with sources on India in Ger­man archives that are not dis­played in the project’s data­base, there­in sup­ple­ment­ing its archival “raw data”.

This infor­ma­tion, pri­mar­i­ly pre­sent­ed in the form of com­pre­hen­sive lists that are derived from sources housed in sev­er­al archives and col­lec­tions, is often in dia­logue with entries to be found in the Archival Reflex­i­con. One illus­tra­tive exam­ple is the list of sources from the Hei­drich Papers locat­ed in the archive of Leib­niz-Zen­trum Mod­ern­er Ori­ent, Berlin and the Archival Reflex­i­con entry which offers a meta-reflec­tion on the process of trac­ing, index­ing and enlist­ing such sources. As a con­nect­ing bridge among the three con­sti­tu­tive pil­lars of the research por­tal, The­mat­ic Resources thus pro­vide a com­ple­men­tary pool of back­ground sources and also enable a com­pre­hen­sive overview of sources on spe­cif­ic topics.

The list­ed infor­ma­tion on archival sources results from indi­vid­ual MIDA research projects and the team’s col­lab­o­ra­tive work with asso­ci­at­ed part­ners. The pri­ma­ry aim is to present overviews of sources on India-Ger­many entan­gle­ments or sources relat­ed to mod­ern Indi­an his­to­ry in Ger­man archives on spe­cif­ic themes (for exam­ple, suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed dis­ser­ta­tions on India sub­mit­ted at Ger­man uni­ver­si­ties). At the same time, these entries also offer the pos­si­bil­i­ty for enlist­ing var­ied kinds of sources, for exam­ple, India relat­ed sound files in the Lautarchiv of the Hum­boldt-Uni­ver­sität zu Berlin or India relat­ed news­reels in the Progress Archives locat­ed in Berlin. 

Thus, the MIDA research por­tal, and the The­mat­ic Resources in par­tic­u­lar, pro­duce the pos­si­bil­i­ty for the ongo­ing usage of a vari­ety of data from across the Ger­man archival land­scape. Any com­ments and sug­ges­tions from our users are very wel­come! You can reach out to us at: archival.reflexicon@zmo.de