“What does it say there?” – Flora and Fauna in the Trier Dictionary Network

In the occasion of its 100 years anniversary, the Bund Deutscher Landschaftsarchitekten (bdla) honoured the Trier University campus as one of the “100 noteworthy places” in Germany. The honouring has been celebrated with a big summer festival on June 22nd 2013 in cooperation with the Trier Center for Digital Humanities.
Press release (German)

Under the motto “What does it say there?” a poster with selected terms of flora and fauna taken from the Trier Dictionary Network was presented.

The image shows the network of about 400 different and mostly dialectal terms for the ladybug collected from the Trier Dictionary Network (www.woerterbuchnetz.de) digitized by the TCDH for the computer generated presentation. Visitors were very interested in this display and could even take it home as a postcard. Many compared the words on display with the terms personally used and were amused by the partly awkward expressions in the different dialects. In addition to that, a small dialect quiz caused chuckling and amusement.

Showcases with various beetle dissections as well as the respective literature to determine the different species illustrated the biodiversity of the ladybug from a biological as well as linguistic point of view. The literature was taken out of the Department of Biology’s collection of texts, provided by Prof Dr Andrea Möller (Biology and its Didactics, University Trier).