Methods and Tools for the Corpus Annotation of Historical and Contemporary Written Texts

This course deals with methods and tools for the annotation of corpora. The main focus will be written texts, of both historical and contemporary origin. Participants learn to use various existing data categories and tools for manual and automatic annotation and ways of using annotations for research questions.

For the application of structural annotations, the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative are in the centre of this class. For automatic linguistic annotation the CLARIN webservices for text corpora are being employed. Various annotation layers will be discussed: tokenization, sentence boundary detection, Part-of-Speech
tagging, morphological analysis, orthographic normalization, syntactical annotation, content specific and layout annotation. A range of research questions will be discussed that can be answered if corpora are enriched by
annotations. Typical problems for the annotation task will be considered and discussed.

Within the CLARIN infrastructure, WebLicht is a platform for users to access various tools for the automatic linguistic annotation of texts. WebLicht will be used in the class to operate on resources provided or selected by the participants, enriching the information on various annotation levels. Also tools for manual annotations will be shown, especially WebAnno.

This course targets persons from all areas of the humanities interested in language structures and the use of such structures for their research questions.