The RIDGES project (Register in Diachronic German Science) is an investigation into the development of the German scientific language in the early modern and modern periods, ranging from the mid 16th to the late 19th century. Up until the 16th century the scientific language of Europe was Latin, and all scientific texts were written in Latin. Starting in the 16th century, German scientists began writing scientific texts in German. In order to do so, they had to ‘invent’ a scientific register – both a terminology and appropriate text structures had to be developed and tested. Scientific texts have of course changed over the course of the centuries. However most changes are quantitative and not qualitative (categorial). It is only possible to track these developments by comparing texts or collections of texts from multiple points in time.
Within the RIDGES project we therefore analyze scientific texts on all linguistic levels (syntax, word formation, lexis, phraseology, textual structure, etc.), so as to be able to identify and describe developments and trends in the data. Following a variationist approach, we annotate the texts using corpus linguistic methods and quantitative techniques to find changes in textual properties.
As an important part of our project, we involve students in the creation and annotation of corpus resources within their university curriculum. We also make the resulting resources freely available for search and download in multiple formats under the Creative Commons license.
RIDGES is supported by a Google Digital Humanities Research Award. Original facsimiles of texts have been obtained with permission from:
All corpus data generated by the RIDGES project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Deutsch