“The Austrian Academy Corpus, an Extensive Corpus of
German Literature and Language - The AAC Literary Journals Subcorpora”
Hanno
Biber
Austrian Academy Corpus
hanno.biber@oeaw.ac.at
Evelyn
Breiteneder
Austrian Academy Corpus
evelyn.breiteneder@oeaw.ac.at
Karlheinz
Moerth
Austrian Academy Corpus
karlheinz.moerth@oeaw.ac.at
In this paper we would like to present one special subsection of the Austrian
Academy Corpus. The AAC is a newly founded institution organized and planned at
the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, in which large scholarly digital
resources are being established. We will describe the specific selection and
processing of historical literary journals that are to be integrated into the
AAC. The AAC Literary Journals Subcorpora will include a considerable number of
influential journals and magazines which will be made available electronically
and will be analyzed and digitally interrelated by means of XML annotation. The
general concept and the idea of the AAC, its approach and its potential for the
studies of texts of various kinds will also be addressed in this paper.
The AAC is a multifunctional digital text corpus with new research possibilities
in the fields of linguistics as well as for textual research, in the fields of
literary studies, for discourse studies and the like. The AAC, comprising an
abundance of different sources, focuses predominantly on German language texts
from the last 150 years, but also includes translations from other languages and
corresponding source texts. This large electronic text collection contains a
great variety of significant texts, historical texts, literary texts, and texts
stemming from various cultural and social domains. Apart from literary texts and
literary journals, there will be a wide collection of various text types and
other text type carriers incorporated, such as newspapers and newspaper
articles, advertisement, posters, speeches and other examples from the media and
the entertainment domain, the arts, but also from jurisprudence, religion,
politics, philosophy and other domains. The corpus approach being developed at
the AAC is determined by our conviction that for specific language related
research interests only consistent corpora that provide sufficient context can
be useful, corpora that supply users with complete and thoroughly described
texts. This is particularly the case in the field of scholarly research which
focuses towards literary text studies and historical discourse analysis, a field
where literary texts from certain historical periods and their specific features
will be the main objects of investigation. Corpus-based linguistic and literary
text research will be made possible by means of a variety of descriptive
elements integrated into the text collections of the AAC. Reliable corpus tools
and sound methods of corpus description and analysis have become indispensable
means of research. At the AAC, all texts are digitized and annotated by means of
XML, in order to facilitate thorough investigations and research into the
textual qualities of the corpus holdings. How modern technology and standards
can be integrated in traditionally oriented fields of research such as literary
studies will be exemplified through the AAC's digitization projects.
At the core of the AAC and as the starting point for the selection of the texts
to be integrated there is the satirical magazine “Die Fackel” which was
published by Karl Kraus in Vienna from 1899 to 1936. In his abundant satirical
and polemical texts published in ”Die Fackel” consisting of 22.586 pages, Karl
Kraus developed satirical textual strategies in which the use of quotation,
citation, and commentary of others is of major importance. This unique source of
German literature offers a starting point not only for the future incorporation
of other texts in our corpus but also for further far-reaching and challenging
research into a number of linguistic, discursive and intertextual phenomena to
be observed. The magazine published by Karl Kraus offers us a unique opportunity
to attract the attention of anyone interested in the German language. And the
AAC intends to digitally present a wide selection of different sources of
scholarly, journalistic and political texts which were of considerable influence
between 1848 and 1989.
In the first phase of the corpus build-up we have started with the digitisation
and structured integration of texts, among which are several highly influential
and notable literary journals and magazines. Literary journals have been
integrated into the AAC for several reasons. One reason is their importance form
the point of view of literary history. Literary journals have been neglected in
the studies of literary history although they form an integral part of the
literary life. Very often they are the place where the first publications of
major literary works appear. They are in a mediator position within the literary
market and have been so especially in the 19th and 20th centuries not only in
the German speaking countries. Secondly, literary journals have been chosen as a
considerable subcorpus of the AAC because in most cases literary journals offer
a wide variety of interesting text types. Depending on their general and overall
political and ideological orientations they offer multiple sources and sources
of various kinds which are of particular interest for corpus research both from
theoretical and methodological perspectives. The differences and relations
between the various literary text types pose challenging questions concerning
the description and the development of digital scholarly material.
Among the source materials for the AAC literary journals subcorpora is the well
known literary and political journal “Die Weltbuehne” (The World Stage),
previously published under the title “Die Schaubuehne” (The Theatrical Stage)
since 1905, and two journals that were of major importance for the expressionist
movement, “Die Aktion” and “Der Sturm”, all of them published in Berlin in the
first decades of the last century. The journal “Der Brenner” was published in
Innsbruck in Austria between 1910 and 1954 and is another example from the AAC
literary journal subcorpora and was like the ones mentioned above also
influenced by “Die Fackel”. In our paper we will briefly describe the
interrelations between these examples from the perspective of literary history,
and thereby concentrate on the corpus methodology of applying digital techniques
for the description of the processes and qualities observed. We will explain the
complex digitization processes and the necessary annotation schemes utilized by
the AAC working group in order to access the data contained and to be explored
in these valuable resources. In addition to that the new editing strategies
being developed by the AAC as well as the scholarly commentaries will be
presented. The literary journal subcorpora can be regarded as an experimental
and exemplary cohesive subsection of the Austrian Academy Corpus.