The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB)

The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB) was funded in 1990 and is a research infrastructure and projects platform bringing together philosophy, editorial philology and text technology. It is a meeting place for intellectuals, technicians, scholars and students from many different research fields and geographical areas around the world (see incoming visits). The research infrastructure includes digital and paper copies as well as transcriptions of Wittgenstein's Nachlass as it was catalogued by his trustee G.H. von Wright in his 1969 article «The Wittgenstein Papers». It also includes a hand library with Wittgenstein primary and secondary literature in a number of different languages. NB: Please note that WAB does not possess any Wittgenstein originals.

WAB is probably best known for the publication of «Wittgenstein's Nachlass. The Bergen Electronic Edition» (BEE, Oxford University Press 2000) and its more recent initiatives to publish the Nachlass open access. BEE offers on six CDs facsimile as well as normalized and diplomatic text editions of the manuscripts and typescripts of Wittgenstein's philosophical Nachlass. The edition is equipped with a range of search and analysis functions. Since 2014, WAB is producing a new digital facsimile of the Wittgenstein Nachlass which is made available open access on the Wittgenstein Source site. Moreover, WAB gives since 2016 interactive open access to all its transcriptions of the Wittgenstein Nachlass on the interactive dynamic presentation (IDP) site. On the semantic faceted search and browsing (SFB) site, WAB offers in addition semantic faceted search and browsing of Wittgenstein metadata, again with a focus on Wittgenstein's philosophical Nachlass. And finally, WAB offers with WiTTFind, a cooperation with the Centrum für Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung an der Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, advanced tools for Nachlass text search.

WAB has a role central place in the Nordic Wittgenstein Society. It has had a leading role in both the creation of the Nordic Wittgenstein Review (NWR) and the creation of the book series Nordic Wittgenstein Studies which continues WAB's earlier series Publications from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen. WAB is also engaged in building a repository of research literature and materials secondary sources.

There is a long tradition of Wittgenstein research at the Philosophy Department at the University of Bergen that continues today with ongoing work being done both in the scholarly interpretation of Wittgenstein’s writings as well as in the application of his work to areas such as text technology and digital humanities, the philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of mathematics and aesthetics. WAB is at the heart of this research as also in giving a course on Wittgenstein's philosophy at the Department.

On October 31, 2017, the philosophical Nachlass of Ludwig Wittgenstein was inscribed to the UNESCO Memory of the World list. We are proud and happy that we are central in giving the world access to the philosophical Nachlass of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

For information about the history of WAB see the reports site.