The Dictionary Network

Digital dictionaries and lexicons are, just like their printed equivalents, related to one another in various ways, and, thus, somehow implicitly give rise to networks of information. However, due to the differences in terms of purpose, arrangement and structure of the individual works, simultaneous investigations can rarely be carried out, even with digitized works. Digital lexicons and dictionaries which have been marked up in terms of content and structure, and, thus, have been structured into comparable units of information, enriched with meta-data, are capable of making explicit the aforementioned network structures. As a result, a new, higher quality of information extraction can be achieved, and the gap between the cumbersome usability and the limited availability of the printed versions on the one hand, and disordered and scattered information of ordinary web search engines on the other can be bridged.

Apart from the linking of its own dictionary resources, provided by the Center for Digital Humanities, the Dictionary Network also offers the possibility of integrating external electronic documents. Thus, every user may refer to the persistent address of a certain article and integrate it into her/ his own electronic text in order to, for example, link a reference to a particular dictionary entry directly with the resource on the server of the Center. In addition to this interactive, individual linking, complete lists of headwords with corresponding URLs may be provided, too. Thereby, a far-reaching inter-linking between an externally installed dictionary and the resources of the Dictionary Network can be realized. So far, for example, links between the Dictionary of Historical German Legal Terms, the Dictionary of German Winegrowers' Language and the Dictionary Network have been created.