Current issues
We are very delighted that our project was honored with the award for excellent teaching (Preis für gute Lehre).
The RIDGES project (Register in Diachronic German Science) is an investigation into the development of the German scientific language in the early modern and modern periods, ranging from the mid 15th to the 20th century. Up until the 15th century the scientific language of Europe was Latin, and all scientific texts were written in Latin. Starting in the 15th century, German scientists began writing scientific texts in German. In order to do so, they had to ‘invent’ a scientific register – both a terminology and appropriate text structures had to be developed and tested. Scientific texts have of course changed over the course of the centuries. However most changes are quantitative and not qualitative (categorial). It is only possible to track these developments by comparing texts or collections of texts from multiple points in time.
Within the RIDGES project we therefore analyze scientific texts on all linguistic levels (syntax, word formation, lexis, phraseology, textual structure, etc.), so as to be able to identify and describe developments and trends in the data. Following a variationist approach, we annotate the texts using corpus linguistic methods and quantitative techniques to find changes in textual properties. Therefore we use different formats, e.g. Excel and ANNIS. In the documentation section every preparation step of each version is described precisely.
As an important part of our project, we involve students in the creation and annotation of corpus resources within their university curriculum. We also make the resulting resources freely available for search and download in multiple formats under the Creative Commons license.
To this date, the following students have contributed to RIDGES (in alphabetical order):
Ilham Abed-Ali, Diana Allamirano, Silke Andresen, Henriette Ast, Valeska Beckert, Malte Belz, Katrin Benning, Thomas Berg, Cornelia Binnyus, Simon Blum, Swenja Bödecker, Doreen Christen, Camilla Colombo, Janin Czilwik, Bianca David, Mascha Dayal, Antonia Dittberner, Cora Döhn, Imke Driemel, Elisabeth Eberle, Christian Ebert, Olja Efremova, Gill-Maria Eichhorn, Stefanie Enneper, Judith Esser, Beate Federau, Nico Friesenhan Catharina Fischer, Karolina Flisikowski, Nerina Gärtner, Felix Gehrke, Selina Gellweiler, Annegret Gerlach, Julia Gerolf, Linda Giesel, Svenja Guhr, Rahel Gajaneh Hartz, Kyra Hellmann, Yelyzaveta Hiebert, Hagen Hirschmann, Morice Hömmen, Stephanie Jandt, Bodil Jessen, Maria Kampermann, Keqin Ji, Nikolaos Kartalis, Sebastian Kiraga, Laura Köhler, Ewa Anna Kolbik, Birka Kondeyne, Anna Konik, Kornél Kovàcs, Marco Krämer, Daisy Krüger, Svetlana Kucenko, Till Kulawik, Anna-Maria Lehmann, Eliese-Sophia Lincke, Maria Lober, Robert Lorenz, Anke Lüdeling, Laura Lueders, Tatjana Malon, Samuele Maniscalco, Maria Martynova, Kim Kristin Maser, Laura McKee, Manuel Metzig, Alexander Meyer, Annika Mittelstädt, Lisa Mohs, Sandra Müller, Vinzent Müller, Andrew Murphy, Johannes Mursell, Juliane Nau, Carolin Odebrecht, Akiko Okuda, Jonas Opitz, Mareike Otto, Maik Papenhagen, Angelo Papenhoff, Laura Perlitz, Tilo Petersohn, Simona Petrova, Viktoria Peselmann, Steffen Pfennigwerth, Joachim Polte, Gina Reetz, Valerie Reichardt, Katharina Reinig, Guendalina Reul, Ina Riesler, Lena Rosin, Romy Sachs, Franz-Josef Sachse, Anna Sapronova, Simon Sauer, Jan Christian Schaffert, Anna Greta Schmahl, Claudia Schmidt, Gohar Schnelle, Johannes Schütz, Athina Sioupi, Sarah Sippach, Andrea Skotovic, Lucia Sohmen, Iryna Sorokovska, Madeleine Spitzer, Uwe Springmann, Kristina Stephan, Helen Stuke, Aleksandra Swiech, Franka Szperlinski, Juliane Tiemann, Anna Tóth, Réka Tóth, Phuong Thao Tran, Alexander Turtureanu, Gertje Utpatel, Esra Uyanik, Hanna Varachkina, Magdalena Vock, Mirjam Vogler, Marike de Vries Monika Walak, Linnéa Clara Weitkamp, Andrea Weißbarth, Juliana Wekel, Vita Rosalie Wijffels, Alexandra Wiemann, Svenja Wolter, Isabell Ines Zander, Karolina Zuchewicz.
The RIDGES team consists of Anke Lüdeling, Amir Zeldes, Carolin Odebrecht, Thomas Krause, Vivian Voigt, Malte Belz, Gohar Schnelle, Catharina Fischer and Laura Perlitz.
Furthermore Uwe Springmann is associated to the project.
The LAUDATIO project (www.laudatio-repository.org) hosts and curates the RIDGES Herbology corpus in cooperation with the LangBank project (sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/langbank).
RIDGES is supported by a Google Digital Humanities Research Award. Original facsimiles of texts have been obtained with permission from:
All corpus data generated by the RIDGES project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Always quote when using the data:
Anke Lüdeling, Carolin Odebrecht, Thomas Krause, Gohar Schnelle,
Catharina Fischer; RIDGES-Herbology (Version 9.0), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.