AAC-FACKEL and BRENNER ONLINE. New Digital Editions of Two Literary Journals

In this paper two highly innovative digital editions will be
presented. The digital editions of the historical literary journals
“Die Fackel” (published by Karl Kraus in Vienna from 1899
to 1936) and “Der Brenner” (published by Ludwig Ficker in
Innsbruck from 1910 to 1954) have been developed within the
corpus research framework of the “AAC - Austrian Academy
Corpus” at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in collaboration
with other researchers and programmers in the AAC from
Vienna together with the graphic designer Anne Burdick from
Los Angeles. For the creation of these scholarly digital editions
the AAC edition philosophy and principles have been made
use of whereby new corpus research methods have been
applied for questions of computational philology and textual
studies in a digital environment. The examples of these online
editions will give insights into the potentials and the benefi ts
of making corpus research methods and techniques available
for scholarly research into language and literature.
Introduction
The “AAC - Austrian Academy Corpus” is a corpus research
unit at the Austrian Academy of Sciences concerned with
establishing and exploring large electronic text corpora and
with conducting scholarly research in the fi eld of corpora and
digital text collections and editions. The texts integrated into
the AAC are predominantly German language texts of historical
and cultural signifi cance from the last 150 years. The AAC has
collected thousands of texts from various authors, representing
many different text types from all over the German speaking
world. Among the sources, which systematically cover various
domains, genres and types, are newspapers, literary journals,
novels, dramas, poems, advertisements, essays on various
subjects, travel literature, cookbooks, pamphlets, political
speeches as well as a variety of scientifi c, legal, and religious
texts, to name just a few forms. The AAC provides resources
for investigations into the linguistic and textual properties of
these texts and into their historical and cultural qualities. More
than 350 million running words of text have been scanned, digitized, integrated and annotated. The selection of texts is
made according to the AAC’s principles of text selection that
are determined by specifi c research interests as well as by
systematic historical, empirical and typological parameters.
The annotation schemes of the AAC, based upon XML
related standards, have in the phase of corpus build-up been
concerned with the application of basic structural mark-up
and selective thematic annotations. In the phase of application
development specifi c thematic annotations are being made
exploring questions of linguistic and textual scholarly research
as well as experimental and exploratory mark-up. Journals are
regarded as interesting sources for corpus research because
they comprise a great variety of text types over a long period
of time. Therefore, model digital editions of literary journals
have been developed: The AAC-FACKEL was published on 1
January 2007 and BRENNER ONLINE followed in October
2007. The basic elements and features of our approach
of corpus research in the fi eld of textual studies will be
demonstrated in this paper.
AAC-FACKEL
Figure 1. AAC-FACKEL Interface
The digital edition of the journal “Die Fackel” (“The Torch”),
published and almost entirely written by the satirist and
language critic Karl Kraus in Vienna from 1899 until 1936,
offers free online access to 37 volumes, 415 issues, 922
numbers, comprising more than 22.500 pages and 6 million
tokens. It contains a fully searchable database of the journal
with various indexes, search tools and navigation aids in an
innovative and functional graphic design interface, where
all pages of the original are available as digital texts and as
facsimile images. The work of Karl Kraus in its many forms,
of which the journal is the core, can be regarded as one of
the most important, contributions to world literature. It is a
source for the history of the time, for its language and its moral
transgressions. Karl Kraus covers in a typical and idiosyncratic
style in thousands of texts the themes of journalism and
war, of politics and corruption, of literature and lying. His
infl uential journal comprises a great variety of essays, notes,
commentaries, aphorisms and poems. The electronic text,
also used for the compilation of a text-dictionary of idioms
(“Wörterbuch der Redensarten zu der von Karl Kraus 1899
bis 1936 herausgegebenen Zeitschrift ‘Die Fackel’”), has been
corrected and enriched by the AAC with information. The
digital edition allows new ways of philological research and
analysis and offers new perspectives for literary studies.
BRENNER ONLINE
Figure 2. BRENNER ONLINE Interface
The literary journal “Der Brenner” was published between
1910 and 1954 in Innsbruck by Ludwig Ficker. The text of 18
volumes, 104 issues, which is a small segment of the AAC’s
overall holdings, is 2 million tokens of corrected and annotated
text, provided with additional information. “Die Fackel” had set
an example for Ludwig Ficker and his own publication. Contrary
to the more widely read satirical journal of Karl Kraus, the
more quiet “Der Brenner” deals primarily with themes of
religion, nature, literature and culture. The philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein was affi liated with the group and participated in
the debates launched by the journal. Among its contributors
is the expressionist poet Georg Trakl, the writer Carl Dallago,
the translator and cultural critic Theodor Haecker, translator
of Søren Kierkegaard and Cardinal Newman into German,
the moralist philosopher Ferdinand Ebner and many others.
The journal covers a variety of subjects and is an important
voice of Austrian culture in the pre and post second world
war periods. The digital edition has been made by the AAC
in collaboration with the Brenner-Archive of the University of Innsbruck. Both institutions have committed themselves
to establish a valuable digital resource for the study of this
literary journal.
Conclusion
The philological and technological principles of digital editions
within the AAC are determined by the conviction that the
methods of corpus research will enable us to produce valuable
resources for scholars. The AAC has developed such model
editions to meet these aims. These editions provide well
structured and well designed access to the sources. All pages
are accessible as electronic text and as facsimile images of
the original. Various indexes and search facilities are provided
so that word forms, personal names, foreign text passages,
illustrations and other resources can be searched for in
various ways. The search mechanisms for personal names have
been implemented in the interface for BRENNER ONLINE
and will be done for “Die Fackel”. The interface is designed to
be easily accessible also to less experienced users of corpora.
Multi-word queries are possible. The search engine supports
left and right truncation. The interface of the AAC-FACKEL
provides also search mechanisms for linguistic searches, allows
to perform lemma queries and offers experimental features.
Instead of searching for particular word forms, queries for all
the word forms of a particular lemma are possible. The same
goes for the POS annotation. The web-sites of both editions
are entirely based on XML and cognate technologies. On the
character level use of Unicode has been made throughout. All
of the content displayed in the digital edition is dynamically
created from XML data. Output is produced through means of
XSLT style sheets. This holds for the text section, the contents
overview and the result lists. We have adopted this approach
to ensure the viability of our data for as long a period as
possible. Both digital editions have been optimized for use
with recent browser versions. One of the basic requirements
is that the browser should be able to handle XML-Dom and
the local system should be furnished with a Unicode font
capable of displaying the necessary characters. The interface
has synchronized fi ve individual frames within one single
window, which can be alternatively expanded and closed as
required. The “Paratext”-section situated within the fi rst frame
provides background information and essays. The “Index”-
section gives access to a variety of indexes, databases and
full-text search mechanisms. The results are displayed in the
adjacent section. The “Contents”-section has been developed,
to show the reader the whole range of the journal ready to
be explored and provides access to the whole run of issues
in chronological order. The “Text”-section has a complex
and powerful navigational bar so that the reader can easily
navigate and read within the journals either in text-mode or
in image-mode from page to page, from text to text, from
issue to issue and with the help of hyperlinks. These digital
editions will function as models for similar applications. The
AAC’s scholarly editions of “Der Brenner” and “Die Fackel”
will contribute to the development of digital resources for
research into language and literature.
References
AAC - Austrian Academy Corpus: http://www.aac.ac.at/fackel
AAC - Austrian Academy Corpus: AAC-FACKEL, Online
Version: Die Fackel. Herausgeber: Karl Kraus, Wien 1899-
1936, AAC Digital Edition No 1, 2007, (http://www.aac.
ac.at/fackel )
AAC - Austrian Academy Corpus and Brenner-Archiv:
BRENNER ONLINE, Online Version: Der Brenner.
Herausgeber: Ludwig Ficker, Innsbruck 1910-1954, AAC
Digital Edition No 2, 2007, (http://www.aac.ac.at/brenner )