The """"AAC - Austrian Academy Corpus"""" is a diachronic German language digital text corpus of more than 500 million tokens. The text corpus has collected several thousands of texts representing a wide range of different text types. The primary research aim is to develop text language resources for the study of texts. For corpus linguistics and corpus based language research large text corpora need to be structured in a systematic way. For this structural purpose the AAC is making use of the notion of container. By container in the context of corpus research we understand a flexible system of pragmatic representation, manipulation, modification and structured storage of annotated items of text. The issue of representing a large corpus in formats that offer only limited space is paradigmatic for the general task of representing a language by just a small collection of text or a small sample of the language. Methods based upon structural normalization and standardization have to be developed in order to provide useful instruments for text studies.

In this paper two highly innovative digital editions will be presented. For the creation and the implementation of these editions the latest developments within corpus research have been taken into account. The digital editions of the historical literary journals Die Fackel (published by Karl Kraus in Vienna from 1899 to 1936) and Der Brenner (published by Ludwig Ficker in Innsbruck from 1910 to 1954) have been developed within the corpus research framework of the “AAC - Austrian Academy Corpus” at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with other researchers and programmers in the AAC from Vienna together with the graphic designer Anne Burdick from Los Angeles. For the creation of these scholarly digital editions the AAC edition philosophy and edition principles have been applied whereby new corpus research methods have been made use of for questions of computational philology and textual studies in a digital environment. The examples of the digital online editions of the literary journals Die Fackel and Der Brenner will give insights into the potentials and the benefits of making corpus research methods and techniques available for scholarly research into language and literature.