LangBank: Digital Infrastructure to Support the Study of Latin and Historical German

Research and education in the Humanities depends on an understanding of the intellectual roots established by classical cultures, such as Greece, Rome, India, and China, as well as historically important languages such as Latin and Historical German. To understand these cultures, students and scholars need to be able to read texts in the original languages. The LangBank Project seeks to promote students’ learning of Classical Latin and Historical German, and to facilitate the ability of more advanced scholars to access a wide range of annotated texts. This new system will rely on modern web-based methods for corpus analysis and distribution, online reading support and demand-driven, incidental tutoring of grammar and vocabulary, and learning analytic methods for tracking how students and scholars use the materials. The project will integrate a wide range of existing resources, frameworks, and technologies. Texts in Classical Latin will be contributed by the Perseus Project and texts in Historical German will come from Lüdeling’s LAUDATIO Project at Berlin. Because Historical German is highly non-standardized for both spelling and grammar, Lüdeling will develop normalization methods supporting both searching and learning use cases. MacWhinney will create computational systems for automatic analysis of the texts on the lexical, morphological, and syntactic levels, and will provide methods for assisting learners in acquiring the vocabulary needed to comprehend specific texts. In Tübingen, Meurers will analyse these texts in terms of linguistic complexity and readability. We will link our formats and methods with those being developed by the Perseus Project and the Alpheios/Arethusa Projects at Leipzig, Graz, and Tufts. The results of the project will include annotated corpora, tools, and publications. For corpus development, we will configure an extensive database of web-accessible annotated texts in Classical Latin and Historical German. In terms of tool creation, we will develop online tutors to help students in reading texts, as well as a set of corpus analysis tools to help advanced scholars study texts. The project will lead to two types of publications: articles based on an analysis of learning and usage data, and articles explaining technical aspects of system construction. To ensure preservation, all source code will be made accessible at sourceforge.net, MacWhinney will incorporate the resultant annotated corpora into the TalkBank data-sharing system, and Lüdeling will incorporate these same corpora into the ANNIS system. To maximize compatibility, the SaltNPepper system will convert between the TalkBank format and many other formats, including the formats recognized by ANNIS. The TalkBank format will be extended to include the orthographic annotation types necessary for these historical texts. Successful completion of this project will be the first step in a more general program for developing similar materials for other historical languages as well as materials to support the reading and corpus study of modern languages.