German History in Documents and Images/Deutsche Geschichte in Dokumenten und Bildern: Creating a New Form of Scholarly Publishing by Transforming a Legacy Site

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The German Historical Institute (GHI), Washington DC, seeks support for a work program to reconceptualize, expand, and modernize its flagship digital project, German History in Documents and Images/Deutsche Geschichte in Dokumenten und Bildern. GHDI is a bilingual source collection covering German history from 1500 to 2009. At the core of the work program is the development and implementation of a new open-source platform based on an eXist database and a Scalar 2.0 presentation layer. The new platform will accommodate the types of materials (e.g., multimedia sources) called for in current historical scholarship, support a range of new narrative approaches to history, and allow for the enrichment of new and existing GHDI sources in accordance with best practices. In combination with a redesigned interface, a consistent TEI markup and metadata schema, and data customization with Scalar, this new infrastructure will facilitate an innovative, historiographically responsive form of scholarly publishing for historical sources. This new form of publishing will draw on the unique affordances of digital media, while affirming the best values of book-based scholarship. The eXist/Scalar 2.0 platform will be designed as an extensible template suitable for other digital projects, especially within the German academic community. Specifically developed for use in digital humanities projects, Scalar is a robust, open-source authoring, editing, and publishing platform that, among other advantages, offers optimal support for dynamic and media-rich content. While Scalar is becoming increasingly popular among North American academics, its use by German speakers is still relatively limited, not least because most messages within the current application framework are hardwired in English. Therefore, the Institute will undertake internationalization work on the Scalar interface to remove those limitations that have hindered the adoption of this promising platform in Germany to date. The identification of German-based platform reuse cases is a key component of the work program, as is the preservation of the original GHDI website in cooperation with DARIAH-DE. Here, GHDI will serve as a model for scholars interested in preserving legacy websites.The GHI is an internationally recognized center for advanced study. It was established in 1987 as an independent non-profit foundation. Since 2002, it has been part of the Max Weber Foundation. The relaunch of GHDI, a well-known legacy site used by Germans and North Americans in approximately equal measure, will bolster the GHI in its role as a hub for digital historians on both sides of the Atlantic and as a place for examining the opportunities and limits of digital history.