eHumanities: Intelligent Analysis and Information System for Humanities and Culture

While electronically available data have played an important role in the natural sciences for a long time, the impact of data and information on the humanities and culture has become clear only recently. Progress in computer science has made it possible to digitize the objects of research from these disciplines so that they can be made available electronically. This digitization assists scientific discourse as well as electronic networking. Key challenges arising in this connection derive from the type of material and the overwhelming amount of objects which need to be digitized. In the following, we discuss the main challenges, goals and solutions in an exemplary fashion for the socalled German Digital Library (DDB) project. This project, being part of the European Library initiative Europeana (www.europeana.eu) is aiming at making available the core objects of 30.000 German cultural and scientific institutions in an online version. We argue that the tasks of analysis, interpretation, and scientific networking can be supported considerably by adequately designed systems that meet the requirements of the humanities and the cultural sector.