2.1 The Library

The library contains all the works currently collected in the program, sorted into folders und sub-folders. There is a biography of each author at the beginning of the folder.

The generally available editions of the authors' works are used as a basis for the project. These tend to use the normalised orthography of the time when the edition was printed. A representation using a critical-historical edition (if one were available) was avoided on the following grounds:

a) Many editions are in themselves inconsistent (e.g. the Weimarer Edition of Goethe's work). This would entail editing the text or being left with many written variations and lemmata which, despite reflecting the spellings, would be of no value to the dictionary (especially from a semantic point of view).

b) 18^th and 19^th Century texts tend to spell 't' as 'th', 20^th Century texts will write simply 't'. It is easily seen that this would result in recording a lot of doubles (e.g. "That" versus "Tat") where no semantic difference exists.

Subsuming the old spelling under a normalised lemma, though possible, would entail an enormous amount of extra work. This stands in no relation to any value that could be gained from a differentiated representation. In consequence, this course of action has not been followed. This has been restricted to normalised editions. In the case of Goethe's or Hölderlin's work, this is unfortunate, but perhaps a solution to this dilemma will be found in future.