Call 2

Prof. dr. P.C. Muysken (Radboud University Nijmegen)

The VU-DNC project has four main aims: 1) to make a unique diachronic corpus of Dutch newspaper articles from five major Dutch newspapers from 1950/1951 and 2002 (2 MW) available to the community of researchers in the humanities, 2) to extend the linguistic annotation of discourse with encoding for lexico-grammatical features of subjectivity and quotations, 3) to create a gold standard benchmark that can be used for testing and training OCR-postcorrection tools, by aligning uncorrected and corrected versions of the digitized printed newspaper articles from 1950/51, and 4) to improve the development of metadata within CLARIN by mapping the data categories for the part of speech and lemma coding to the data category registry, and extending the ISOcat categories for the historical spelling variation, subjectivity and quotations.

PID

References to the Second World War (WW II) shaped political debate in the Netherlands for many decades. However, we have no systematic knowledge of why, how often, when, by whom or from which political party, and in which context, these references were made. Nor do we know the meanings politicians ascribed to the war years, the lessons the war was supposed to teach, and how all of this influenced political decision-making. Answering these questions will help us better understand the complex legacies of WW II.[1]

The WIP project wants to bridge the gap between current historical and social science practices and the possibilities offered by using large corpora and language resources, in particular Clarin tools for Dutch. We will do this by making a much used dataset - de Handelingen der Staten-Generaal (Dutch Hansard) - compliant with Clarin, ISOCAT and ISO/TC 37/SC 4 standards. We will also create an advanced search engine for this dataset with an intuitive and powerful query language based on XPath, and output which can be fed directly into further analysis programs like SPSS. Integrating this technology with important historical research questions will directly contribute to new and innovative ways of writing about history.

The demonstration value of the project is enhanced by the production of an enriched publication in which we answer the research question based on the curated data. URLs in the paper link to research questions operationalized as XQueries which are executable on the curated data.