This seminar showed how to create and link databases into a federated database system. The challenges that have to be overcome in order to build such a system were also shown. However, to implement a federated system, one needs databases. Many humanities researchers do not always have one yet. The data is stored in Word documents or perhaps in TEI, EpiDoc, or other formats. Rather than manually typing the research data into a database, this seminar will show how to get a lot of data into database instance in a short period of time and how to link these databases together to form a federated database system to perform federated searches. This results in more time to concentrate on the research questions.

The research for this contribution was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy - EXC 2176 'Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796.