Google has funded 12 grants in its Digital Humanities Research Awards program. Humboldt-Universität linguist, Anke Lüdeling, is among the award winners. For her project "Annotated Corpora in Studying and Teaching Variation and Change in Academic German" she receives US $50,000 in order to realize the project. As a recipient, Lüdeling and her colleagues will also get some access to Google tools, technologies and expertise.

The rise of linguistic corpora and of analytical methods from corpus linguistics has begun to open up new pathways for understanding variational, non-deterministic linguistic behaviour and for teaching languages and linguistics with usage-based models. They promote a project in which researchers and students build digital resources, develop methodologies and study variation on many linguistic levels in academic registers of German. Using ANNIS, a search and visualization tool for deeply annotated corpora, Lüdeling and her team plan on building a collection of deeply annotated academic texts for the study of the parameters statistically responsible for the special makeup of academic registers and their development in recent history.

The team will use approximately 2/3 of the total award funding for personnel costs to add statistical functionalities and specialized features for register studies to the ANNIS search tool. The remaining 1/3 of the award funding will be used to strengthen the corpus curriculum and offer tutorials for language and linguistics students. Moreover, an international workshop at the end of the project to disseminate the new functionalities and corpora for register studies will be organized.


Anke Lüdeling studied linguistics and computer science at the University of Hamburg and received her doctorate in linguistics from the University of Tübingen. She worked in several linguistic and computational linguistic projects at the Universities of Stuttgart and Osnabrück before becoming Assistant Professor of Corpus Linguistics and Morphology at the Institute for German Language and Linguistics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (receiving tenure in 2008). She is currently head of the Institute. She is also a member in the advisory board eHumanities at the Ministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Federal Department for Education and Research). Her main research interests are: morphological word formation / morphological productivity, acquisition of German as a Foreign Language, linguistic variation, construction and analysis of deeply annotated corpora such as learner corpora and historical corpora as well as the interaction of qualitative and quantitative methods in linguistic research.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Dr. Anke Lüdeling
Professor of Corpus Linguistics and Morphology
Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Unter den Linden 6
10099 Berlin
Phone: +49 30 2093-9799
Email: anke.luedeling@rz.hu-berlin.de