When the AAC started their first digitization experiments – some time before the institutional consolidation as a department – the number of available tools to handle XML conformant data was still very limited. Therefore, the AAC working group had to engage in software development on their own. Activities in this field have since been quite diversified. At the heart of the AAC’s tool-box there is a versatile all-purpose text editor, the Unicode enabled version of which has been dubbed corpedUni. It provides a lot of functionalities tailored to the particular needs of the AAC’s project, not only facilitating the work with single XML documents, but also allowing to manipulate and to manage great numbers of XML documents.
In addition, there are tools to organize the workflow, to index texts, to access and query the corpus, as well as database interfaces and server-side utilities. A lot of what the working group has been doing in their projects is experimental in nature trying to bring together technicians and people from the Humanities, trying to combine elements from the world of Information and Communication Technology and academic disciplines focusing on textual resources.