CLARIN-D for Researchers of German Studies 

What does CLARIN offer for Researchers of German Studies?

CLARIN-D supports research in German studies by providing the following services:

• digital language data (modern and historical German);
• analysis tools for scientific work with digital language data;
• services to access German language data and tools;
• documentation of use cases that show how digital data and tools can be combined for scientific research questions;
• the possibility to provide data and tools for the research community in a sustainable way within a CLARIN-D Centre.

The Working Group 1 »German Philology« is a network of scholars in German studies who contribute to the CLARIN-D infrastructure. Their aim is to support German studies by providing a digital research infrastructure.

Language Data

The CLARIN-D Centres offer a variety of modern and historical as well as oral and written language data for research. Important corpora are for example:

IDS-Textkorpora (Textual corpora for the German Language)

The IDS in Mannheim offers a reference corpus that contains texts from newspapers, non-fiction books, textbooks and literary texts from Germany, Austria and Switzerland from 1772 until today. The service is free of charge when using COSMAS II. 

DWDS-Korpus (Corpus of the Digital Dictionary for German) 

The DWDS is a system that provides information about historical and modern German words. Besides its dictionary components, it also includes reference and special corpora as well as tools to access them.

Deutsches Textarchiv (German Text Archive)

The DTA provides the basis for a reference corpus that shows the development of High German. It includes more than 3000 texts ranging from approximately 1600 until approximately 1900 that are spread across disciplines and genres.

Korpora für gesprochenes Deutsch des BAS (Corpora for Spoken German provided by the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals)

The BAS provides digital language resources of German as well as tools to work with digital speech signals in a structured way.

FOLK/DGD (gesprochene Sprache) (Research and Teaching Corpus for Spoken German)

FOLK includes German conversation data of different areas of social life (work, leisure time, education, public affairs, services, and more). It is provided via the Database for Spoken German (DGD).

Dortmunder Chat Korpus (Dortmund Chat Corpus)

This corpus documents language use in different chat applications using several log files. It is designed as basis and aid for linguistic investigations for Computer Mediated Communication (CMC).

Blog-Korpus (Blog Corpus)

The Blog-Corpus is part of the DWDS applications at the BBAW (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities) in Berlin. It provides blog posts and their corresponding comments for research.

Integration of Language Data

In the area of German studies, three curation projects have made it possible to sustainably integrate three types of data into the CLARIN-D Centres:

• a huge number of historical texts;
• a corpus of spoken scientific language;
• the Dortmund Chat Corpus as a pattern for computer mediated communication.

In the blue box you can find further information about those Curation Projects.

Use Cases

The Working Group "German Philology" has started to document different scientific use cases in different presentation formats (screencasts, instructional texts, videos showing expert interviews).

Example 1

Use of COSMAS II for questions and analyses about word usage in refugee discourses (screencast).

Example 2

Use of WebLicht for research questions about syntactic structures (video expert interview).

You can find those and other use cases on our YouTube Channel or on the sample use cases.

Digital Tools and Web Services

The CLARIN-D Centres offer a huge array of digital tools and web services which can also be used for research questions from the area of German studies. For example:

COSMAS II

The Corpus Search, Management und Analysis System is an analysis environment of the IDS Text Corpus. It allows lemmatized word search, syntactic queries, and complex co-occurence analyses.

DTA/DWDS

The DTA and DWDS Corpora are combined with powerful corpus analysis tools which support word-based, syntactic and collocation-oriented research.

EXMARaLDA

EXMARaLDA is a tool for transcription and annotation of spoken language and meta data. It is XML based and enables interoperable and sustainable data usage.

WebMAUS

WebMAUS is a web-based transcription tool for spoken language. It enables automatic phonetic labeling and segmenting of sound recordings of spoken language.

WebLicht

WebLicht is a web-based environment that enables the combination of different computational linguistic tools to process tool chains. Lemmatizing and automatic syntactic annotation of own texts can easily be done that way.

Federated Content Search (FCS)

By using the Federated Content Search (FCS), resources which are hosted at different CLARIN-D Centres can be used via a uniform analysis interface.

WebAnno

WebAnno is a flexible web-based annotation tool for several linguistic analyses. It allows to track the annotation process as well as to import and export data in several formats.

The Working Group "German Philology"

Within CLARIN-D, different areas of research are organised in working groups. Scholars of German studies are mainly represented by Working Group 1, "German Philology".

Goals and Tasks

The Working Group "German Philology" aims at the following goals and tasks:

• Construction of a knowledge base of existing digital resources, tools, services, and use cases for the different branches of German studies;
• Determination and formulation of specific demands and needs in German studies that the CLARIN-D Centres can help with;
• Planning and carrying out of curation and integration projects that help integrating central resources into the CLARIN-D infrastructure.
• Setting up of documentations for applications of digital data and tools for research questions (screencasts, digital expert interviews, instructional texts).

Currently, 26 renowned researchers from different areas of German studies (Linguistics, Literature and Media Studies) participate in the working group "German Philology". The personal profiles and key research areas of those researchers guarantee that different needs in the branches of German studies and their numerous manifestations are met.

CLARIN-D Centres

The Working Group "German Philology" is managed by the CLARIN-D Centre Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim. Regarding historical and diachronic resources the working group also cooperates with the German Text Archive at the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW).

The other CLARIN-D Centres (Hamburg, Leipzig, München, Nijmgen, Saarbrücken, Stuttgart, Tübingen) also provide data and tools for research in German studies.

This offer can be accessed on the following pages:

• List of German CLARIN centres
• Access to research data

Members of the Working Group "German Philology"

• Dr. Norman Ächtler, Universität Gießen
• Prof. Dr. Michael Beißwenger, Universität Duisburg-Essen
• Prof. Dr. Noah Bubenhofer, ZHAW Winterthur
• Prof. Dr. Angelika Braun, Universität Trier
• Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Bucher, Universität Trier
• Prof. Dr. Arnulf Deppermann, IDS Mannheim/Universität Mannheim
• Prof. em. Dr. Gerd Fritz, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
• Dr. Alexander Geyken, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
• Prof. Dr. Elvira Glaser, Universität Zürich
• Dr. Eva Gredel, Universität Mannheim
• Prof. Dr. Mechthild Habermann, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
• Prof. Dr. Martin Huber, Universität Bayreuth
• Eva-Maria Jakobs, RWTH Aachen, until 2017
• Prof. Dr. Fotis Jannidis, Universität Würzburg, also a representative of DARIAH-DE
• Prof. Dr. Jörg Kilian, Universität Kiel (advisory member)
• Prof. Dr. Alfred Lameli, Universität Freiburg
• Prof. Dr. Alexander Lasch, TU Dresden
• Prof. Dr. Henning Lobin, head of IDS Mannheim and Universität Mannheim
• Prof. Dr. Konstanze Marx, IDS Mannheim and Universität Mannheim
• Dr. Simon Meier-Vieracker, Technische Universität Berlin
• Dr. Klaus Nippert, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
• Prof. Dr. Dietmar Rösler, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
• Prof. Dr. Paul Rössler, Universität Regensburg
• Prof. Dr. Ingrid Schröder, Universität Hamburg
• Dr. Thomas Stäcker, Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel)
• Prof. Dr. Angelika Storrer, Universität Mannheim
• Prof. Dr. Uwe Wirth, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
• Prof. Dr. Andreas Witt, Universität zu Köln and Universität Mannheim

Coordination and Contact

The Working Group "German Philology" is coordinated at the Justus-Liebig-University Gießen (Prof. Dr. Thomas Gloning and Melanie Grumt Suárez).

• Prof. Dr. Thomas Gloning [thomas.gloning@germanistik.uni-giessen.de]
• Melanie Grumt Suárez [melanie.grumt-suarez@germanistik.uni-giessen.de]

Employees until 2016

• Jurgita Baranauskaite
• Stefanie Seim