Das niedersorbische Globalkorpus als Ziel einer ganzheitlichen Konzeption zum Aufbau von Textkorpora

Abstract

The Lower Sorbian Global Corpus as the Goal of a Comprehensive Concept for Creating Text Corpora

The Sorbian Institute has long been working on assembling and processing electronic text corpora, which have particular significance for research into Sorbian. Using Lower Sorbian as an example, but at the same time keeping the whole of Sorbian writing in mind, a process for creating corpus texts of high quality is being established and presented, which tries to combine different goals and interests systematically with each other: the documentation of writing which has been handed down to us, the creation of a reliable data base for research based on corpus texts, and the provision of this data in a way that allows for the most varied, barrier-free and efficient use possible. At the same time, while taking into account the specific circumstances in the study of Sorbian, a balance between automated and manual procedures is achieved. A further aim of this overall procedure is to grant the least restrictive, convenient access possible to the individual texts as representative examples of writing, leading to their preparation for inclusion in a digital  library. In this way, an important part of the Sorbian cultural heritage can be made available as a “store of knowledge”, and as a researchable image of a cultural practice reflected in literature.