FuD is a virtual research environment for research in the humanities and social sciences. The modular software maps the entire research process and supports collaborative research that is independent of time and location. Whether print or online edition, or both as a hybrid edition, whether content, discourse or network analysis, whether indexing work or management of research data - FuD offers a multitude of tools for data collection, annotation, analysis and processing up to publication and archiving. And even for highly complex data models, the user does not need to acquire any knowledge of XML!

Areas of application

FuD is versatile and can be used for a wide range of project goals and workflows.

Prosopography
FuD offers a tool to record individuals, institutions, and groups and their networks and to explore them ever more deeply in the ongoing research process.

Digital and print editions
FuD can be used to prepare works that have already been published in print for online publication. FuD can also be used to create various digital, historical-critical editions of works from scratch.

Collection management
With FuD, primary research data can be recorded using a jointly developed metadata schema and shared within a research group.

Analysis
FuD supports the analysis of text and image data with its annotation tools. The tools can be adapted to the project-specific research method.

Network analysis
On the basis of annotated texts, a visualization tool connected to FuD is used to analyse and display networks.

Metadata
FuD supports the structured recording of document metadata via individual input masks.

System architecture

FuD is a modular software system whose subcomponents are connected to each other via well-defined interfaces.

The FuD working environment is used for data collection, analysis and editorial processing. This is a client-server architecture (tcl/Tk, MySQL database), whereby the FuD client is installed on the workstation computer, with which the data is processed on the FuD server. The FuD client is available for current Windows operating systems and, in a slightly reduced form, also for Macintosh operating systems. This architecture requires a permanent Internet connection to the server while working with the system.

Other systems such as Zotero for managing secondary literature or the transcription tool "Transcribo" for transcribing full texts are connected to the FuD working environment. This is configured according to project-specific requirements.

Existing structured data can be imported into the working environment via import interfaces (XML, TXT, OAI).

The publication environment accesses the database of the FuD working environment via a JSON interface (Elastic Search Index). It is based on Angular and can be accessed via current browsers (optimized for Chrome and Mozilla).

The archiving environment is based on the virtual data repository "ViDa" for which an export interface is currently implemented in the FuD working environment. As part of the reimplementation of the ViDa system, the data will be imported from the FuD working environment to ViDa via the ViDa ingest builder.

List of Research that used FuD

Current Use-Cases include:

• Creation of personal databases
• Creation of digital editions and source and register editions (print & online)
• Maintaining & indexing of archive holdings and collaborative material collections
• Discourse analysis
• Networks analysis

A list of projects using FuD can be found here