La red vascológica de Schuchardt / Schuchardt’s bascological network

Among the founding factors for modernism in philology/linguistics, there were two important medial innovations as a consequence of industrialization: new printing technologies and the installation of a general mail system. This contribution explores their catalyzing effects on the basis of Schuchardt’s bascology, showing that the (pre-)academic network of epistolary exchange, of reviewing and other types of contact, which had been created by those innovative scholars, is at least as important for the development of the humanities as the publications in sensu stricto. Moreover, this paper illustrates modern techniques applied in the digital and open source «Hugo Schuchardt Archiv», which virtually reconstruct the network which had existed in the 19th century. The archive publishes, among other things, at the moment nearly 8,000 letters with originals, transcription and comments (from which around 1,700 with bascological interest).