A Woman's Journey Round the World by Ida Pfeiffer

Welcome!

Explore our digital scholarly edition produced as part of the course From Text to Pixel: Digitization, Digital Editions, On-Site Practice, held at Central European University in Vienna, Austria between January-March 2026. This 12-week-long course took us on a journey to explore the process and workflow of professional text digitization, followed by the study and practice of conceptualizing and creating digital scholarly editions as critical interventions and argumentative statements for a broader readership.

Since our lingua franca at CEU is English, we used the translated version of a book by the 19th-century Viennese traveler, Ida Pfeiffer (née Reyer 1797-1858), entitled A Woman's Journey Round the World: from Vienna to Brazil, Chili, Tahiti, China, Hindostan, Persia and Asia Minor (1851). The book has been digitized and made openly available by the Austrian National Library. For more information on the author and our project, visit the About section of this site.

Editors:
Instructor: Dr. Alíz Horváth
Teaching Assistant: Boris Fonarkov
Students (A-Z): Matt Dreher, Naomi Ho, Giray Kalkan, Eva Kiser, Sarah Kovacic, Asya Kurtuldu, Anna Lavalley, Gunhyuk Lee, Chisato Matsui, Shohruh Sadullaev, Sydney Szijarto, Shan Tanta, Sonam Tsering, Yuni Zeng.

Special thanks to colleagues from the Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek), particularly Iris Klawatsch and her team, as well as Christoph Steindl, Johannes Knüchel, and Martina Bürgermeister for their contributions and guidance in different parts of the course.

How to navigate this site:

Explore the contents of Ida Pfeiffer's book chapter by chapter. This section includes both the scanned version and the annotated transcription. You can select specific contents by chapter and by tags.

Search for concrete keywords and select from text, image, and text+image view for the output.

Content:

About: This section offers an introduction about Ida Pfeiffer, our editorial team, the digital scholarly edition project, our tag system as argument, and our collaborators.

Critical commentaries by each editor related to the chapters that they worked with.

Bonus:

Interactive map: we have additionally created a map to visually represent the stages of Ida Pfeiffer's journey.

Note: The original book was published in the 19th century and includes stereotyping related to ethnicity and race. Working with this material does not mean that our group shares these views - we approached this book as a historical primary source.

Image: Ida Pfeiffer (née Reyer), Austrian National Library, public domain.