COST Action
„Medieval Europe: Medieval Cultures and Technological Resources”
Workshop

Connecting Textual Corpora and Dictionaries
25-26 April 2013, Kraków (Poland)

Scientific goals

One of the numerous objectives of COST Action 1005 „Medioevo Europeo” is the development of the Virtual Centre of Medieval Studies (VCMS) which shall integrate hitherto dissipate databases, textual collections, and dictionaries into a mature tool for carrying out research on Middle Ages. This goal, however, can only be achieved with reflection on the existing tools, practices, and users’ needs. These are the crucial questions which we want to address with our workshop which focuses on the corpus-dictionary interface.

Our meeting will start with a short presentation of the digital projects that are being carried out in the Institute of Polish Language in Kraków (Polish Academy of Sciences) which hosts the workshop. The first working session (State of Art: Good (and Bad) Practices, Formats, APIs, Interfaces) will comprise brief „state of art” reports dealing with the existing tools of the lexicographical and textual research. It will provide us with a deepened insight into the technical issues of the prospective tools’ integration and will contribute to the description of good and bad practices of dictionary and corpora linking. Each participant will try to describe the databases according to the strict protocol which includes their chronological and geographical scope, search and browsing capabilities, interface type, file formats, encoding standards, licensing model, and web APIs.

The second working session (Corpora Use in Lexicographic Practice) provides real-world scenarios of the use of corpora-dictionary interface. Practising lexicographers will demonstrate how corpora facilitate everyday dictionary writing processes and how text collections can be exploited in order to enrich the lexicon. The contributions gathered in this section shall help to precise what are the features of the prospective VCMS that would satisfy the lexicographers’ community, and what are the interlinking models that would match its needs.

The last two sections (Mature Projects: Goals, Tools, Challenges and Emerging Projects: Perspectives and Challenges) of the workshop will group demonstrations, mock-ups, and practical learning sessions. Creators of mature projects and research infrastructures will share their experience in what concerns the syntactic and semantic interoperability of their services. They will also offer other participants a short training. Those, in turn, whose projects are only in the construction or planning phase, will demonstrate their scientific goals, and the problems they encounter in assuring high data linking profile.

Local Organizer
Institute of Polish Language
Polish Academy of Sciences
al. Mickiewicza 31
31-120 Kraków

Organization Committee

• Workshop Program
• Dr. Sabine Tittel (Dictionnaire Étymologique de l’Ancien Français, Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities), Expert of the COST Action Working Group 4
• Krzysztof Nowak (Lexicon Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis Polonorum, Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences), Expert of the COST Action Working Group 3

• Organizational Issues
  • Prof. Michał Rzepiela (Lexicon Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis Polonorum, Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences), COST Action Management Committee Member

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