Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel) / Online Dictionary of Medieval Spanish - Digitalization and Publication of the Diccionario del Español Medieval (DEM)'s data archive in an online database organized according to basic semantic structure

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Rafael Arnold; Professorin Ulrike Henny-Krahmer; Karsten Labahn
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 282533776

The project aims at offering a broad, international public free and efficient access to an extensive data archive of medieval Spanish (Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico – DEMel) grounded on sound scientific research and organized according to semantic structure. The archive is based on the extensive and hitherto unpublished data compiled during the preliminary work on the Diccionario del Español Medieval. It draws on a broad range of 600 books or collections of texts and documents dating from the 10th to the beginning of the 15th century and contains about 700,000 record cards with the medieval word forms as well as information on context, date, grammar, semantic use and etymology. Public access to the database is an act of paramount importance, given the absence of a complete historical dictionary of medieval Spanish. The diversity of genres and registers (literary texts, religious and legal documents, technical and scientific treatises on astronomy, medicine, botany etc.) will enable interested researchers – Hispanists as well as others – to investigate unexplored fields of the Spanish medieval lexicon and provide a valuable source of research not only in Spanish studies, but also in Islamic and Jewish studies, cultural studies, theology etc. Before the start of the project, the archive was only available in paper form. At the current stage (04/2022), all record cards have been digitized and are now freely accessible at https://demel.uni-rostock.de. To provide an efficient search mechanism, a database structure was designed to enter a – so far limited – selection of information (lemma with part of speech, documented word form, short form of the source, date of the attestation and, if applicable, multi-word expression). During the follow-up project, the automatic searchability will be extended: The context of the medieval Spanish attestations and their location will be generated by tagging the attestations in their respective source texts. The annotated texts that are under a free license will be also displayed in the DEMel portal and will be offered for download. To complete the digitization and indexing of the whole archive, the published dictionary volumes of the DEM (a-alm) will be integrated into the database in digitized form in order to offer the users a better access. Finally, the DEMel results will be made accessible for reuse in the context of the digital Romance Studies and Digital Humanities. In accordance with the FAIR principles, the aim is to increase the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of the data.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• International Connection: Spain
• Participating Institution: Universität Rostock; Philosophische Fakultät; Institut für Germanistik; Universität Rostock ; Institut für Romanistik; Universität Rostock ; Universitätsbibliothek
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Alejandro Fajardo Aguirre; Professor Dr. José Antonio Pascual Rodriguez
• Co-Investigators: Privatdozentin Dr. Eva Maria Güida; Professorin Dr. Jutta Langenbacher-Liebgott