A Multifunctional Historical Document Research System

In this talk, the key components of a multifunctional historical document research system are discussed. An ongoing project which aims at creating a representative corpus of documents that reflect the impact of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the period 1865-1945 forms the case study for the system. The realisation of the system includes several working fields: the collection of relevant historical documents, the digitization and choice of a suitable library-oriented data standards for archival storage, the design and implementation of a database, the development of fuzzy techniques for searching on documents with a non-standard orthography, the preparation of communication, annotation and visualisation tools, and the design of a user interface adapted for heterogeneous user group ranging from interested amateurs to experts.