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

01/09/2015 to 15/10/2018

The LangBank (Digital Infrastructure to Support the Study of Latin and Historical German) project is dedicated to the creation of a resource of annotated texts in Classical Latin and Histroical German. Access to a wide range of fully annotated texts is an important asset for research in humanities as well as for the acquisition of languages: While it is imperative for teachers and students to find texts adapted to both, the intended illustrational purpose and the learner's proficiency level, scholars are in need of accessing several texts with respect to specific language properties, such as grammatical constructions, vocabulary, spelling differences, etc.

Historical languages play a central role in the study of culture. They are crucial in humanistic scholarship, for example in the domains of history, religion, philosophie, literature and linguistics. The comparative study of texts relies on the accessability of texts and analysis methods. Also, the acquistion of language strongly depends on the availability of natural examples. However, an infrastructure providing these requirements is currently lacking for Classical Latin and Histrorical German. We, therefore, intend to provide both, methods to assure the accessability of relevant texts and exploration tools for relations within texts, to support scholars in their research. Furthermore, methods to increase language competence of learners of Classical Latin and Historical German will be provided.

For these purposes, we employ modern web-based methods for corpus analysis and distribution. Our system will provide online reading support and demand-driven, incidental tutoring of grammar and vocabulary learning. Also, analytic methods for tracking how students and scholars use the materials will be implemented.