Alexander von Humboldt Explores
the Americas in a Digital Library
10:00 a.m., Monday, Sept. 15, 2008
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission: free

Humboldt was the most significant scientific explorer before Darwin, whom he influenced greatly. Two hundred years ago, he traveled from Madrid to Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, and the United States. He published 29 volumes about botany, zoology, geography, geology, and all other disciplines of his times. Professor Frank Baron and his colleagues have created a digital library of all his writings in English. The system can perform operations that go beyond the capabilities of the available digital libraries on the Internet. One of its many innovative features is that one can navigate on Google Earth and enter the texts from any point of Humboldt’s travels.

Frank Baron, director of the Max Kade Center for German-American Studies at the University of Kansas, has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He began teaching at the University of Kansas in 1970, after two years with the Peace Corps in Ethiopia and an additional two years conducting research in Munich on German Renaissance and Reformation literary history. Experiences as a child in Hungary during World War II prompted interest in the topic of the Holocaust and resulted (in collaboration with Hungarian journalist Sandor Szenes) in a book about Hungary and Auschwitz.