Computer-Aided Processing of Old German Texts
University of Würzburg, 4-6 March 1997
Jakob Fix
Oxford Text Archive
jakob.fix@oucs.ox.ac.uk
MAVAT
(Maschinelle Verarbeitung altdeutscher Texte) is an international conference
whose objective is to investigate and promote the use of computers in the field
of Old German philology and linguistic research. It was founded in 1972 through
the initiative of two German linguists, Hugo Moser and Wilfried Lenders. The
fifth MAVAT conference took place this year in Würzburg, nine years after
the previous one. Although, or indeed perhaps because the conference's topic is
a rather specific one, participants came from all over the world: Austria,
Germany, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, United States, and the UK.
The organisers at Würzburg University's Department of German Language
decided to focus on three topics during this conference: 1) the use and
influence of New Media for Old German philology; 2) the use and importance of
corpora for the subject; 3) lexicography in general. Besides these foci, there
was also interest in legal issues connected with the use and creation of
copyright material.
The opening speech, given by Norbert Richard Wolff, one of the organisers,
caused some amusement with its comparison of research results from computing
humanists with the virtual Japanese pop star Kyoko Date. The last MAVAT
conference in 1988, he recalled, was dominated by a concern for basic technical
issues like disk sizes and processor speed. This conference, he hoped, would
address the higher-level problems which researchers continue to face.
Language and Corpora
The first presentation was given by Lou Burnard (Oxford University) on the
British National Corpus (BNC). Lou outlined how this huge project was sponsored,
how the texts were selected, how the corpus was created and a description of the
various stages of production. He also drew attention to how copyright issues
were solved by the use of a standard agreement drawn up with the co-operation of
the Society of Authors, the Publishers Association, and other interested
parties. Finally, he showed some screenshots to illustrate how the BNC can be
used. Although the BNC created a significant amount of interest some
participants were disappointed to learn that the Corpus is currently only
available to members of the European Union.
Randall Jones (Brigham Young University Provo) discussed his experiences of
creating a corpus on colloquial German in (then West and East) Germany, Austria,
and Switzerland. He and others conducted interviews in settlements ranging from
villages to large cities which were then transcribed. However, some of the
problems involved became apparent in the discussion afterwards, when Swiss
participants claimed there was nothing like a Swiss Standard German, and a
participant from Northern Germany was able to falsify another of Jones' results.
These problems seemed to be mainly caused by the fact that not all interviewees
were really 'natives', and results therefore were sometimes imprecise.
Thomas Klein (Bonn University) talked about the possibilities of using
computers to make lemmatised indices of Middle High German (MHG) texts
searchable, and to link exceptions to the respective paragraph(s) in a MHG
grammar book. If such an index exists for a text, it can then be searched for
word classes, inflection (if applicable), for the normalised form of a word,
rhymes, and so on. In the subsequent discussion, questions focused on the
grammar book's choice (Paul/Wiehl/Grosse), and on the idiosyncratic markup used.
Wolfgang Klein (Institut für deutsche Sprache (IDS), Mannheim) spoke
about the techniques and software used at the IDS to transcribe taped
conversations. The IDS has developed DIDA ('Diskursdatenbank') which allows for
the continuous entry of conversation, with an unlimited number of speakers, and
the possibility of adding general and (speaker-) specific comments. The software
is used for the creation of corpora which are the basis of COSMAS (Corpus
Storage, Maintenance, and Access System).
The theoretical underpinnings to corpus research at the IDS and COSMAS were
given the next day by its IT department's manager, Robert Neumann. He introduced
the IDS' concept of the 'virtual corpus', which enables users of COSMAS to
select a number of corpora and thus to create an individual corpus for their
specific needs. A demonstration is available at
http://www.ids-mannheim.de/ldv/cosmas/
Klaus Schmidt (Bowling Green State University) and Horst P. Pütz (Kiel
University) presented on probably 'the largest electronic text archive of
medieval German literature' currently available (about 100 texts, 1 million
lines of text, and 8 million individual words). It is fully lemmatized and can
be queried over the Internet through thesaurus-like conceptual categories, as
the speakers demonstrated during their presentation. Further details available
at http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/greal/MHDBDB.html
Jakob Fix completed the proceedings of the first day with a presentation on
how to use SGML, and the TEI Guidelines in particular, to encode dialect
dictionaries. He demonstrated how, once the text is encoded, the dictionary can
be displayed using a WWW or a dedicated SGML browser, and how it can be searched
using OpenText, a SGML-aware text search and retrieval application. Highlighted
were two particular problems: how to get the printed book into electronic form,
and how to display the unusual phonetic transcription, Teuthonista.
Texts and Archives
The second day started off with two presentations on existing text centres,
or archives. Catherine Tousignant, University of Virginia, introduced the
Electronic Text Center (ETC) at the University of Virginia Library. She was
followed by Alan Morrison who talked about the Oxford Text Archive (OTA). This
was of interest to the audience, as a German text repository does not as yet
exist. The universities of Oxford and Virginia have two quite different
approaches. The ETC is fully dependent on the University library, whereas the
OTA is jointly funded by Oxford University and the Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC). The OTA is part of the Oxford University Computing Services,
whilst the ETC is integrated with a library, both dependencies having advantages
and drawbacks. However, the American institution draws heavily on the use of
graduate students for many tasks, while this possibility has yet to be explored
at the OTA.
In the evening, participants were invited to a public lecture by Michael
Sperberg-McQueen. His eloquent lecture, given in German, was titled 'Die
Hochzeit der Philologie mit dem Merkur: Philologische Datenverarbeitung' (The
Marriage of Philology and Mercury: Philological Computing). Essentially Michael
gave an overview of different text models, ranging from what he called the
'linear text' (a text regarded as a string of characters) to the 'rectangular
text' (text consisting of words consisting of characters, and having
characteristics and functions) to the 'text cake with command bits' (for which
read: text with layout information, such as RTF or LaTeX), and finally, the
'tree structure text model with element types' which is, as one would expect
from an SGML expert, an abstraction for SGML, and has by far the most
possibilities and advantages to precisely define a text grammar or structure
which then can be used for analysis or presentation of the text.
The last day saw many parallel presentations to choose from. In the morning,
there was a talk by Ralf Plate and Ute Recker (University of Trier) on how they
use computers to prepare the creation of a Middle High German dictionary. The
main goal presented (and, apparently, demonstrated in a later workshop) was to
replace the traditional, huge collection of index cards with an electronic
collection of lemmatised texts, the latter produced by an interactive program
that is based on TUSTEP. Further details on this project are available from
http://www.uni-trier.de/uni/fb9394/germanis.htm
Heinz Korten and Michael Prinz (University of Regensburg) presented an
impressive prototype of multimedia place name books. These books contain much
information about the origin of place names, their connection with other names,
detailed descriptions of where they occur, etc. This mass of information lends
itself to a multimedia presentation. The project shown, in fact supporting
material for the speakers' Masters Theses, was produced as a Toolbook
application on CD-ROM. Although only sample data was entered, the application's
functionality was obvious: for example, there were click-sensitive maps, entries
from the printed place name books, spoken audio samples from each place, a note
pad function, and the entire corpus of material could be searched.
Ingrid Lemberg (Academy of Heidelberg), spoke about another dictionary
project, the
German
Legal Dictionary, whose goal is to record all medieval legal sources in
dictionary form. For that purpose, a custom-made database system, FAUST, is used
which was originally designed for library systems. Ingrid described how the
dictionary is created and how the system has helped to eliminate errors and make
the whole process smoother.
The 'father' of TUSTEP, Wilhelm Ott (University of Tuebingen) gave a short
introduction on the current state of TUSTEP followed by a number of
presentations demonstrating how the software can be used. For example, TUSTEP
can be (and is) used to produce critical editions. The system is able to collate
several versions of a manuscript, to select one as the main version, and to give
all changes, omissions or additions in footnotes. However, this process needed
some editing of configuration files for every task executed, and the syntax of
TUSTEP commands requires Gewoehnung. Further details about TUSTEP may be
found at http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/zdv/zrlinfo/tustep-des.html.
Wolfram Schneider-Lastin (University of Basle) showed an extension to TUSTEP
which makes data input much easier. He has developed an equivalent of 'forms' in
database packages for the DOS version of TUSTEP, including drop-down menus,
restriction of entries, automatic error checking, etc.
Conclusion
At the end of this conference, it became apparent that there is little or no
consensus on appropriate standards amongst scholars working with Old German
texts. Each researcher or group develops their own programs (perhaps based on
SGML or TUSTEP), resulting in much duplication of effort. Outside of this
conference, information exchange between scholars working in this area would
appear to be rather sparse. In his closing speech, Norbert R. Wolf concluded
that the need for standards was recognised by the majority of those present;
that text repositories which offer reliable German texts for research are
desirable; and that corpora are an important field of research. The next MAVAT
will take place 2002 when, one hopes, scholars will be even further advanced in
their application of new technologies to the study of German text.
[Table of Contents] [Letter to the Editor]
Computers & Texts 14 (1997), 15. Not to be republished in any form
without the author's permission.
HTML Author: Michael
Fraser (mike.fraser@oucs.ox.ac.uk)
Document Created: 24 May 1997
Document
Modified: 8 October 1997
The URL of this document is
http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/publish/comtxt/ct14/fix.html