LODinG Subproject at the Annual Conference of the German Association for Applied Linguistics (GAL)

The title citation, "Cholera Outbreak Forced Return," is taken from Carl Grimm's work The Economic Value of German East Africa, published in Berlin in 1886. This citation provides various pieces of information on both linguistic and extralinguistic levels. It first informs us that there was a cholera outbreak, locates this outbreak in a specific place, and indicates that the consequence of this outbreak was the forced return of people to their place of origin. Examples like these are being incorporated into the ongoing Trier Dictionary Project on Historical Pandemics (Kabatnik et al., in press).

This presentation will introduce the historical dictionary project "Pandemictionary," which is part of the LODinG project at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities. The project focuses on the vocabulary of historical pandemics such as cholera and the Spanish flu. It investigates how people spoke about these pandemics by searching historical corpora and capturing pandemic-related vocabulary as Linked Open Data. The data is prepared both for publication and querying in a Wikibase, as well as for a dictionary in a wiki instance modeled after the structure of Wiktionary. The dictionary provides information on the meaning, pronunciation, and grammar of entries, along with authentic citation examples that illustrate the usage and nuances of the words in different contexts. These examples are crucial for demonstrating the actual usage of words, enhancing understanding (Klosa/Kupietz/Lüngen 2012: 71/72), and improving the communicative abilities of users, thereby making the dictionary practical and relevant (Klosa/Töpel/Koplenig 2012: 93ff.).

Our presentation examines the lexicographical process of selecting citation examples (Klosa/Kupietz/Lüngen 2012: 75ff.), including criteria for their evaluation and applicability (Lettner 2020). Additionally, it illustrates the advantages of preparing data as Linked Open Data: by linking dictionary entries, citations, and their corresponding text sources, users gain direct access to the extended usage context of the entries in the digital full texts. Capturing metadata for the citation examples allows for refined searches in the data, filtered by citation date, text type, and source, thereby enabling more targeted use of the dictionary. In the Linked Open Data paradigm, the network-like structure of the dictionary offers unique opportunities for both its construction and use: for example, dictionary entries—sometimes multiple entries—can be derived from citation instances in the sense of corpus-based lexicography (Klosa 2015), with which they are mutually linked. After presenting the dictionary project, we will explain its structure, the construction of the dictionary network, the underlying historical corpora, and the selection and rejection of citations for various dictionary entries.

Kabatnik, Susanne/Klee, Anne/Bamberg, Claudia/Burch, Thomas/Hinzmann, Maria (i.V.): Das historische Pandemiewörterbuch Pandemictionary als lexikographisches Linked Open Data-Netzwerk.
Klosa, Annette (2015): Korpusgestützte Lexikographie: besser, schneller, umfangreicher?. Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Bibliothek.
Klosa, Annette/Kupietz, Marc/Lüngen, Harald (2012): Zum Nutzen von Korpusauszeichnungen für die Lexikographie. Lexicographica, 28(2012), 71-98.
Klosa, Annette/Töpel, Antje/ Koplenig, Alexander (2012). Zur Funktion und Rezeption von Belegen–Ergebnisse einer Benutzungsstudie zum Onlinewörterbuch ‚elexiko’. Sprachwissenschaft, 37(1), 93-123.
Lettner, Khrystyna (2020): Zur Theorie des lexikographischen Beispiels: Die Beispielangaben in der ein- und zweisprachigen pädagogischen Lexikographie des Deutschen. (Lexikographica. Series Maior 158). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.