Historical Information Science: Is There Such a Thing? New Comments on an Old Idea [1993]

Abstract

After a summary of earlier arguments for the differences between information handled in contemporary data bases and information in historical information systems, the model previously proposed for that is extended to include the possibilities introduced by digital image processing, notably the processing of digitized manuscripts. From this conceptual model, a blueprint for a data type “extended string” is derived, which proposes to represent historical texts not as arrays, as usual in computer technology, but by a special data type which implies the representation of strings as graphs. Some engineering considerations for the realization of such a graph based handling of strings are given.