Projects

Current Projects with Third-Party Funding

Arabic and Latin Glossary

The Arabic and Latin Glossary is a digital dictionary of Arabic-Latin translations from the Middle Ages. It improves our knowledge of the Arabic influence on the scientific vocabulary of Latin Europe and of the identity and techniques of the translators.

Archeology & Digital Humanities

Funding from the VolkswagenStiftung enables JMU to establish junior professorships (tenure track) for Near Eastern Archaeology (focus on Anatolia) and for Digital Humanities in the field of Near Eastern Archaeology and Ancient Oriental Studies. The programme started in 2021.

Arthurian literature from the library of the Duc de Nemours

This project deliberately focuses on the end of (late) medieval Arthurian literature in France. In addition to automatic text recognition, annotation and editing of various Arthurian novels from the library of the Duc de Nemours, other older manuscripts are also being consulted. Furthermore, it examines the specific characteristics of these texts, which were written at a time when the social and aesthetic contexts were different from those of the early 13th century.

Käte Hamburger Center for Studies in Messianism (CEMES)

Concepts of a more just society and expectations placed on messianic figures continue to shape political, cultural, and religious dynamics today. The Käte Hamburger Center for Studies in Messianism investigates these phenomena in an international, interdisciplinary, and transhistorical context. By examining both their potential and their risks, the Kolleg contributes research-based insights that help strengthen democratic societies.

Computational Analysis of Music Audio Recordings: A Cross-Version Approach

In this Emmy Noether Junior Research Group, classical music datasets comprising multiple versions (sheet music and recordings) of musical works are used to evaluate, understand and improve deep learning methods
for music analysis.

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Corpus of Hittite ritual texts

Reconstruction and indexing of ritual texts from Hittite Anatolia in the form of web-based editions.

Corpus monodicum

Research and edition of musically significant, editorially underexplored collections of monophonic ecclesiastical and secular music from the European Middle Ages with Latin Texts.

Digital Pathways to the Hittite World

The project combines Ancient Oriental Studies, Near Eastern Archaeology and Digital Humanities to gain new insights into the world of the Hittites. Plans include expanding the Hittitology Portal Mainz (HPM) with linked open data, using large language models (LLM) to reconstruct missing text segments, improving the geolocation of cuneiform tablets and seals from Boğazköy-Ḫattuša for spatial analysis, and implementing shape recognition for the automatic classification of Hittite ceramics.

© Universitätsbibliothek der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Foto: Bernhard Ludewig.

Digital Library of Fairy Tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Digitisation and provision of the reference collection of the Grimm brothers' working library in the University Library of HU Berlin.

Photo Poetry in Illustrated Magazines between 1895 and 1945

Indexing of the genre of multimedial photo poetry from magazines of the first half of the 20th century in a metadata database.

From English in Hong Kong to Hong Kong English

The aim of the project is to examine the development of historical business letters and newspaper data from Hong Kong in their socio-historical context and therefore identify variety-specific innovations in these genres.

Geolingual Studies

Geolingual Studies (GLS) takes a fresh look at the interaction between physical and sociocultural space. This innovative teaching and research unit falls within the field of applied linguistics and is fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature. GLS combines methods from linguistics, geography/remote sensing, digital humanities and natural language processing.

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Complete Catalogue of Arabic-Latin Translations and Translators of the Middle Ages

The project is producing a comprehensive annotated catalogue of all Arabic-Latin translations from the Middle Ages, which will comprise around 550 entries. The data records are being compiled in a semantic media wiki. This foundation enables research into digital modelling of translator styles, distinguishing between author-specific and subject-specific influences.

Würzburg: House Register without Houses

Social-historical and topographical reconstruction of a lost city through the evaluation and compilation of various types of archival material from the 17th to 19th century.

Historical Schoolbooks

Digitisation and cataloguing of historical schoolbooks with a focus on religious education and the creation of a knowledge base for research into the history of education

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Informing, documenting, advising: Integrated name, text and image database on the use of colonial street names from 1945 to the present day

The project aims to establish a digital database on the handling of colonial street names since 1945 and also serves as an information and advisory platform. It combines scientific analysis with elements of citizen science and is being developed in collaboration with the ZPD at the University of Würzburg.

More — Projectsite

Reassessing the Textual Tradition of the Book of Judith

The project aims to provide a reassessment of the textual history of the Book of Judit. By examining ten manuscripts selected from the Greek, Latin, Syriac, and medieval Hebrew textual traditions, key transitional stages in the textual history of the Book of Judit can be investigated. To this end, a digital synopsis will be created.

Lovell Digital

The aim of this project is to produce a digital synoptic edition of the epistolary novel "William Lovell" by Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), which appeared in several versions between 1795 and 1828.

Musical Instruments in Ancient Mesopotamia (MIAM)

The aim of the DFG project is to collect, index and catalogue texts, images and artefacts depicting musical instruments in ancient Mesopotamia.

Musico Pratico - Pietro Pontio’s Dialogues in Translation, Digital Analysis, and Critical Reception

The project “Musico Pratico” closes an existing research gap by providing the first critical editions of the two central music-theoretical treatises by Pietro Pontio, along with German and English translations, and by making them digitally available in open access according to current standards (TEI/MEI). In addition, the project connects the areas of expertise in Basel and Würzburg within the framework of a Weave project.

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Richard Wagner Writings (RWS)

Indexing of Richard Wagner's entire legacy of around 230 texts, comprising some 5,000 pages, based on all surviving historical textual evidence.

Robert Schumann's Poetic World (RSPW)

Digital historical-critical edition of the collection of writings, poems and compositions to explore Robert Schumann's poetic world.

Seven Sages of Rome

The "Seven Sages of Rome" is a text that has been preserved in multiple languages and versions, and is being digitally edited and annotated for the first time as part of this project. One focus will be to examine the gender politics in the text from the perspective of current gender studies.

Robust and High-Performance Methods for Layout Analysis in OCR-D

The aim of the project is to improve the quality and robustness of layout analysis for historical documents, thereby ensuring their practical suitability for mass digitisation. The work focuses on the further development of complementary methods for layout analysis.

Tive - Studies on the Hurrian Language and Its Transmission

Hurrian is a non-Indo-European cuneiform language attested in the 2nd millennium BCE. Its study has so far lagged significantly behind that of neighboring disciplines, as essential reference works such as a grammar and dictionary are lacking and many texts remain untranslated. A newly approved long-term project funded by the DFG, abbreviated Tive (Hurrian for “word”), addresses this gap and aims to develop fundamental reference tools for the sustainable study of this language.

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Past Projects with Thrid-Party Funding

ACAWAI-CS

The ACAWAI-CS project links West Asian cylinder seals and sealed clay artefacts from three millennia for the Semantic Web.

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Arabic and Latin Corpus

Cataloguing and digitisation of Arabic-Latin translations from the 10th to 14th centuries.

Measuring the World by Degrees. Intensity in Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy (1400-1650)

Research into early modern forms of quantification that developed in medicine and natural philosophy in connection with the measurement of intensity – an essential thread linking various disciplines of knowledge that has never been investigated in relation to the topic and for the period considered in this proposal (1400–1650).

DigiMusTh: Dualism in 19th-century music theory

The DigiMusTh project is dedicated to building a digital collection and analysing historical music theory texts, particularly those concerning the debate on major-minor dualism in the 19th century.

More — Projectsite

Diskmags

This collaborative project, funded by the NFDI consortium Text+, focuses on digital magazines from the home computer scene of the 1980s and 1990s that were published exclusively on floppy disk – so-called floppy disk magazines, or ‘diskmags’ for short. The aims of the project are to create an international catalogue and a representative text corpus of German-language diskmag content.

Project Page — Diskmags-Poster (DH23)

Emotions in Drama

The project investigates digital methods for emotion analysis in German dramas between 1650 and 1825.

Early Modern Medical Correspondence

Indexing of correspondence between academically trained physicians in the (historical) German-speaking world from the period between 1500 and 1700 in a database.

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Hittite Cuneiform Texts in Digital Form

The DFG-funded project ‘Thesaurus Linguarum Hethaeorum digitalis’ (TLHdig) is creating a digital repository of cuneiform manuscripts from clay tablet collections of Hittite Anatolia (c. 1600-1200 BC). As part of the digital infrastructure ‘Hittitology Portal Mainz’, TLHdig will provide online access to approximately 30,000 transliterated cuneiform manuscripts.

Kallimachos

KALLIMACHOS brings together humanities scholars and computer scientists in a regional digital humanities centre. The centre's development was funded in two phases from 2014 to 2017 and 2017 to 2019 by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the e-Humanities funding programme.

Medicinae Alumni Vitebergenses

The project investigates the influence of the University of Wittenberg on the development and dissemination of a specifically Protestant form of medicine between 1502 and 1648.

Digital Narragonia

The Digital Narragonia project explores the early history of Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools (1494), a key text of the early modern period in Europe. A total of ten German, Low German, Latin and French editions and adaptations of the Ship of Fools, printed before 1500, are being made available for the first time on a digital research platform.

Narragonia Latina

The Narragonia Latina research project, based at Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, was funded by the German Research Foundation from 2021 onwards. It aimed to produce an annotated bilingual hybrid edition of the Latin “Narrenschiff” versions by Jakob Locher (1497) and Jodocus Badius (1505).

OCR4all-libraries – Full text recognition of historical collections

Funded as part of the third phase of the DFG's OCR-D funding initiative, this project aims to expand and adapt the GUI-based open source tool OCR4all so that libraries and archives can use the solutions developed as part of the OCR-D project in a low-threshold, flexible and independent manner for their mass digitisation projects.

Opera Camerarii / Camerarius digital

DFG-funded indexing of the printed works and letters of Joachim Camerarius the Elder (1500-1574) using a semantic database (2017-2019; published) and through OCR of the Latin-Greek texts and an online encyclopaedia of fields of knowledge (2021-2024).

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Self-Funded Projects

Automatic Text Recognition of Medieval Manuscripts

This collaboration between the Chair of Older German Philology and the ZPD aims to automatically transcribe Middle High German and Early New High German manuscripts using an HTR process.

Database of Linguistic Cases of Doubt (ZweiDat)

Documentation and analysis of significant advisory texts intended to resolve cases of doubt and comparable normative problems in the New High German language. The exemplary text corpus spans from the 17th century to the present day.

Dialect Documents from Franconia (FrankDiDok)

Systematic listing and networking of dialect records from the Lower Franconian Dialect Institute.

Digitisation of libretti from the Hamburg Gänsemarktoper from 1678 to 1730

Full text capture of the aforementioned libretti using OCR4all. The aim is to expand the historically and systematically incomplete digital corpus on German-language theatre in the 16th and 17th centuries to include influential musical theatre texts from around 1700. The resulting data will also be used in the DFG-funded project "Emotions in drama".

Specialised Text Database (FTDB)

Systematic indexing, networking and bibliographic enrichment of digital full texts from the history of technical and scientific German language up to the year 1700.

Greifswald Digital

Cataloguing the historical (vernacular) texts of a single city from the 14th to 17th century, using the city of Greifswald as an example. The data is based on a corpus of texts from Low and High German manuscripts, printed works and inscriptions, whose transcriptions are linked to external data bases and simple annotations according to defined categories relevant to linguistic history.

Arabic and Latin Glossary

Archeology & Digital Humanities

Arthurian literature from the library of the Duc de Nemours

Käte Hamburger Center for Studies in Messianism (CEMES)

Computational Analysis of Music Audio Recordings: A Cross-Version Approach

Corpus of Hittite ritual texts

Corpus monodicum

Digital Pathways to the Hittite World

Digital Library of Fairy Tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Photo Poetry in Illustrated Magazines between 1895 and 1945

From English in Hong Kong to Hong Kong English

Geolingual Studies

Complete Catalogue of Arabic-Latin Translations and Translators of the Middle Ages

Würzburg: House Register without Houses

Historical Schoolbooks

Informing, documenting, advising: Integrated name, text and image database on the use of colonial street names from 1945 to the present day

Reassessing the Textual Tradition of the Book of Judith

Lovell Digital

Musical Instruments in Ancient Mesopotamia (MIAM)

Musico Pratico - Pietro Pontio’s Dialogues in Translation, Digital Analysis, and Critical Reception

Richard Wagner Writings (RWS)

Robert Schumann's Poetic World (RSPW)

Seven Sages of Rome

Robust and High-Performance Methods for Layout Analysis in OCR-D

Tive - Studies on the Hurrian Language and Its Transmission

ACAWAI-CS

Arabic and Latin Corpus

Measuring the World by Degrees. Intensity in Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy (1400-1650)

DigiMusTh: Dualism in 19th-century music theory

Diskmags

Emotions in Drama

Early Modern Medical Correspondence

Hittite Cuneiform Texts in Digital Form

Kallimachos

Medicinae Alumni Vitebergenses

Digital Narragonia

Narragonia Latina

OCR4all-libraries – Full text recognition of historical collections

Opera Camerarii / Camerarius digital

Automatic Text Recognition of Medieval Manuscripts

Database of Linguistic Cases of Doubt (ZweiDat)

Dialect Documents from Franconia (FrankDiDok)

Digitisation of libretti from the Hamburg Gänsemarktoper from 1678 to 1730

Specialised Text Database (FTDB)

Greifswald Digital

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