TextPloring: Research Data Exploration in the Humanities with the LAUDATIO Repository

• Applicants: Malte Dreyer; Professor Dr. Torsten Hiltmann; Professorin Dr. Anke Lüdeling
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Medieval History ; Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536177165

The aim of the TextPloring project is to extend the LAUDATIO repository, which is already established in historical linguistics, in such a way that other fields of the humanities can also use it for the comprehensive exploration and (re-)use of historical text sources. Based on the particular requirements of History, the currently domain-specific repository and its tools will be extended for a cross-disciplinary perspective and methodology. Thus, an infrastructural gap will be closed, since presently established generic repositories in the humanities are not designed to represent and describe the diversity of historical text corpora in such a way that the research data can be found systematically on the level of annotation as well as on the level of source types and content. The TextPloring project is designed to enable a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of text data. This is based on a multi-layered description on the basis of metadata. While the metadata available in LAUDATIO so far mainly comprise project- and language-related information, the metadata schema is to be extended for historical research by contextual - such as spatial, temporal and person- as well as topic-related - information. From a functional point of view, a further development focus lies on the (increased) integration of authority files and ontologies for the description and identification of entities (including persons, works, places) as well as on the implementation of presentation features for plaintext and XML-based data. This approach enables relevance-based search and targeted reuse of the processed research data. The goal of the projected development of LAUDATIO within the framework of the "e-Research Technologies" funding program is thus to optimize the already existing and implemented technologies with regard to other fields and to consolidate them in a cross-disciplinary manner through this expansion.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)