MIDDLE HIGH GERMAN INTERLINKED: A COMPREHENSIVE DIGITAL TEXT ARCHIVE

Electronic texts of all kinds can be found on the World Wide Web today, even texts in medieval German. However, the quality and reliability of these texts vary. Some websites offer texts with typographical markup (e.g. Gutenberg.de or Bibliotheca Augustana) and some provide texts with elaborate retrieval techniques where the results of searches are electronically linked to more robustly encoded full texts (e.g. the Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank). But regardless of the level of encoding, most electronic text archives concentrate only on primary texts; editorial additions (such as paratextual material such as introductions, critical apparatuses) are omitted as well as the lexicographical aids in glossaries and commentaries to the edited texts. In the case of medieval texts, such editorial components are essential for the academic to gain the most valuable reading and understanding of medieval vernaculars. The central goal of the project, Middle High German Interlinked/ Digitales Mittelhochdeutsches Textarchiv, is to provide comprehensive textual editions (including introductions to each text, the primary texts themselves, word glossaries, and other editorial additions) and to link these electronic editions to external lexicographical resources. In the end, the project will house an XML-encoded electronic text archive of about 100 Middle High German texts and their glossaries. The texts will be interlinked with their glossary entries and those glossary entries will interlink with the existing Middle High German dictionaries. This interlinking system will provide numerous discovery and retrieval strategies to maximize the reading and etymological contexts of each work. This project, a collaboration between XML specialists at the Electronic Text Center of the University of Virginia and linguistic experts in the German Department at the University of Trier, is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The starting point of this collaboration is the compound of Middle High German dictionaries consisting of the following components: • G.F. Benecke/ W. Müller/ F. Zarncke, Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch (1854-1861) • M. Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch (1872-1878); and its Nachträge (= supplements) (1878) • K. Gärtner/ Ch. Gerhardt/ J. Jaehrling/ R. Plate/ W. Röll/ E.Timm, Findebuch zum mittelhochdeutschen Wortschatz (1992) All three dictionaries are closely related to one another: Lexer’s dictionary is an alphabetical index and supplement to the older dictionary by Benecke, Müller and Zarncke and refers to it by explicit references. The Findebuch represents a compilation of glossary references to texts that have appeared since 1878 when 111
Lexer’s Handwörterbuch had been completed. The Findebuch contains headwords and siglas that point to full glossary entries. These three dictionaries have been freely available on the Web since 1999 as an interlinked dictionary compound (http://www.mwv.uni-trier.de) and is also available from S. Hirzel (Stuttgart) on a CD-ROM which features more sophisticated retrieval facilities than the internet version. For Middle High German Interlinked all editions upon which the Findebuch is based have been digitised and will form one of the largest text archives in and on Middle High German on the Web. While the texts of the archive can be read and studied as individual objects, the multidirectional interlinking to glossaries and dictionaries enriches the lexicographical contexts of these works and augments the researcher’s own work in linguistic history and analysis of the Middle High German period. The project provides a model realization of the multiple opportunities of linking and electronically merging information gathered from large text corpora and dictionaries. In this presentation at the 2003 ACH/ALLC, the authors will present problems that such a large undertaking has posed, discuss the solutions to these problems, and finally demonstrate a version of the system on the Web to enhance future work in this field.