Digitization of the „Corpus altdeutscher Originalurkunden“

With the digitization of the "corpus of old German original documents up to the year 1300", this central text corpus for research into Middle High German was made accessible in a new form. The digital version creates a reception basis with further access options, which on the one hand can stand for itself as a closed information system, on the other hand it is used by various research projects as a basis and a work tool. The electronic version of the "Corpus" was created in close cooperation with the Digital Middle High German Text Archive.

The "Corpus of the old German original documents up to the year 1300", founded by Friedrich Wilhelm, includes in 5 sub-volumes (almost) completely all German-language documents from the beginnings to the end of 1299, namely 4422 pieces with around 1.3 million reference words (around 20 million characters). The documents are texts of different linguistic origins from the legal and business life of the 13th century. Over 90% of the documents come from the Upper German-speaking area, Central German documents are less common and Low German documents are comparatively rare. Only a few of the documents have survived from before 1250 (0.2%), while the proportion of documents from the years between 1281 and 1300 is around 85%.