Creating digital editions of historical maps

The development of tools for digital image manipulation and the spread of internet technology, which today is available for almost everybody, have given rise to completely new publication forms. Whereas digital publications in linguistics were until recently limited to text editions, nowadays cartographic work can also be digitally republished. This is true for both contemporary and historical maps. In the beginning, the individual applications were designed to run on a user’s local workstation. However, in the meantime this local approach has been widely replaced by server-based technology coupled with information transfer via the internet. In this regard, the interactivity of applications is of particular importance. This development leads to new possibilities of information exchange. However, it also raises new questions in terms of standardization. The principles guiding scientific editions need to be revisited. On the one hand, a digital publication opens up many possibilities for enriching the original edition with additional data. On the other hand, data manipulations and the integration of or linkage to further data can lead to basic philological principles, such as strict faithfulness in the reproduction of the original item, not being respected.This chapter discusses the main issues affecting digital editions of historical maps, drawing on the example of the Digitaler Wenker-Atlas (DiWA, <http://www.diwa.info>), which at present (2009) seems to be the most complex application in this field and which tries to combine both objectives, faithfulness of reproduction with usefulness for linguistic analyses.