The Postil Time Machine: Inner-European Knowledge Transfer as a Graph — the Lithuanian Lutheran Postils of the 16th Century

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Øyvind Eide, since 2/2022; Professorin Dr. Jolanta Gelumbeckaite
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 443985248

The main aim of the project is a corpus-based text genetic and historical linguistic investigation of the Old Lithuanian Lutheran postils (pericopic sermons) and their Latin as well as German (in the case of the Bible passages also Old Greek and Hebrew) sources of translation, and presentation as a new type of digital edition. This is an interdisciplinary project in which historical linguistics (Baltic studies, Indo-European studies) cooperates with computer science (computational linguistics, information visualization, digital editing). ). The project consists of several highly interrelated tasks. The main philological tasks are: (1) identification of the design principles and translation strategies of the Lithuanian texts, (2) determining the intra- and intertextual references of the postils, and (3) the linguistic-historical interpretation of their contents in the form of a linguistically deeply annotated reference corpus. The main computer scientific tasks are: (1) the detection of intra- and intertextual references as well as the alignment with the so-identified originals using machine translation, which will be advanced through the project, (2) the modeling as a graph (and the development of a Linked Open Data interface using TEI-RDFa), as well as the graphical representation of these structures as an interactive visualization, and (3) the implementation of a platform to make the research results searchable, traversable and generally accessible. The publicly accessible presentation of the Lithuanian Lutheran postils in all their intertextual complexity largely reflects the cultural and historical context, often difficult to reconstruct for complex texts. As a new type of digital edition, the online environment enables the user to study and meanwhile keep in sight not only the text itself, but also its direct precedents and other points of reference.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Christian Chiarcos, until 1/2022