Key-Documents of German-Jewish History from Early Modern Times to the Present Age. Creation of a user-friendly Online-Platform on Jewish History

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Miriam Rürup
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 268470421

The online source edition ¿Key-Documents of German-Jewish History from Early Modern Times tothe Present Age¿ considers itself an innovative project to both apply and develop existing digitalinfrastructures and electronic publication-tools. Within the project, standard formats of digitizationand long-term-archiving are combined with a user-friendly way of source presentation. A digitalsource edition that seriously considers challenges as much as chances of digitization and thereforeboth has to comply with the standards and best practices of scientific work in projects of digitaledition as well as creating an attractive way of presentation. A transparent documentation of theproject¿s results and experiences will help to establish a best-practice model for the creation ofdigital source editions.In the initial phase, the online source edition will provide approximately 150 key documents onGerman-Jewish history, containing textual, visual, and audio-visual sources. Incorporating differenttypes of sources increases the edition¿s attractiveness and at the same time contributes to thestandardization of digitizing video and audio recordings.In the first instance the focus will be Hamburg, the city serving as an example for broaderquestions and topics on German-Jewish history. The documents will not only be digitized andtranscribed, but located in their respective historical context through interpretative and backgroundtexts. These texts, written by experts, also provide results of ongoing research-projects. Highemphasis is put on comprehensive previous research. Three ways are provided to access thesources: thematic categories, a timeline, and a map. The editorial incorporation of the digitizeddocuments distinguishes the project to a special degree and increases by the same token the userfriendliness of this digital information supply on German-Jewish history. It thus offers a structurethat can easily be adapted for other platforms with different thematic backgrounds but similarneeds.

• DFG Programme: Science Communication, Research Data, eResearch (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)