The focus of this project is making historical text documents digitally available. Difficulties are posed by scans of low quality facsimiles, old font types, inconsistent transcriptions and especially typical optical character recognition (OCR) errors and spelling variation. The seminar discusses recent solutions to such problems, concentrating on stochastic string edit distance measures, so-called evidences and the avoidance of static dictionaries. Respective approaches when addressing issues of spelling variation in German and English historical texts are described. We use linguistic evidence transferred to formerly unknown spellings. We manually collected more than 12,800 word pairs of spelling variants or recognition errors and their related standard spellings. Stochastic training on such evidences allows for the development of reliable topic-related search engine modules. Plus de détails à: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~csuros/ColloquesDIRO/A2008.html#prochain