Building on the Auden Musulin Papers project, Auden in Austria Digital (AAD) makes openly accessible all archival papers by, or related to, British-American poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973) in Austria through a scholarly digital edition, which will be a unique comprehensive resource for international Auden scholarship.

The project has the following main objectives: (1) making accessible hitherto unpublished literary papers including early versions of Auden’s late poetry, which will shed fresh light onto his practices of composition and revision; (2) processing new biographical information obtained from the documents (e.g. correspondence, legal papers, photographs), which will contribute to an alternative biographical cartography of Auden’s Austrian period 1958-1973 (including networks of artistic collaboration and social interaction); (3) spotlighting underexplored aspects of Austrian history after 1945, with a particular focus on queer history and neglected players in the Austrian literary scenes of the 1960s and 1970s; (4) rendering fully transparent scholarly research and interpretation both in human- and machine-readable formats—thus contributing to a vibrant current strand of research addressing uncertainty-aware data modelling in the Digital Humanities.

The project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF and carried out in close collaboration with major Austrian archival institutions, including the Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, the State Collections of Lower Austria and the Archives of Contemporary Arts, as well as the Vienna City Library. It is situated within a wide network of cooperation partners, including the Estate of W. H. Auden (represented by Edward Mendelson of Columbia University) and QWIEN Zentrum für queere Geschichte (QWIEN Vienna Centre for Queer History).