Compilation, Annotation and Analysis of Written Text Corpora

In this course we will provide an introduction to existing methods for the creation and analysis of linguistic corpora. This will be done to a large extend by hands-on demonstrations. We primarily focus on historical texts, though more recent literature will also be taken into account. Participants' own material can be discussed as well.

Firstly, we demonstrate and discuss the steps towards the creation of corpora, focusing on text selection, treatment of metadata, transcription and representation of the material, methods of (linguistic and text structural) annotation, and finally the presentation and provision of corpora. In this context, standards and best practices for data recognition and annotation will be introduced and applied by example, e. g. the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and specific formats for linguistic text annotation.

Secondly, we will introduce methods of corpus analysis, esp. under consideration of what the CLARIN infrastructure offers in this field. In this context, we will demonstrate the transformation of scientific research questions into complex corpus queries based on linguistic and structural phenomena. Participants will get to know and learn how to use specific tools for corpus analysis, e. g. how to perform complex linguistic searches on the Deutsches Textarchiv corpus considering spelling variance or how to combine services of CLARIN’s WebLicht.