Research Infrastructures at the Institute for the German Language

In recent years, several initiatives in the field of eScience and eHumanities have been started. These activities aim at enhancing national, European, and also world-wide exchange of digital language resources by means of information and communication technology. On a European level, a Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) constitutes a framework for eScience projects. On the national level, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funds several large scale projects in this field.

The Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) engages itself in several eHumanities related projects. Most notably is its participation in the projects CLARIN-D  and TextGrid.

Regarding its structure and research questions, CLARIN-D mirrors the ESFRI project CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technologies Infrastructure) in Germany. CLARIN aims at an integrated, interoperable, stable, persistent, and accessible research infrastructure. To do this, it is necessary to overcome the current fragmentation of resources and technical services, e.g. by using consistent metadata formats, annotation standards and persistent references to web resources.

TextGrid, a cooperation of several German partners from libraries, linguistics, literary studies, and other fields aims at building a Virtual Research Environment for the humanities by means of distributed computing and shared storage. One aim of TextGrid is to offer scholars from different branches of the humanities a graphical user interface to improve the accessibility of the technical infrastructure.