Introducing the Austrian Baroque Corpus: Annotation and Application of a Thematic Research Collection

This paper gives an overview of a relatively new thematic corpus based on German sacred literature of the Baroque period. At present, the digital collection consists of several texts specific to the memento mori genre. All texts in the Austrian Baroque Corpus (ABaC:us) have been enriched with different layers of structural information and tagged using automated tools adapted to the specific needs of the language of the period. One important achievement of the project is that each occurring historic word form has been electronically mapped to its corresponding lemma in High German and corrected or verified by domain experts. In all phases of the workflow, the interdisciplinary team (literary, linguistic, and text technology specialists) insisted on high quality linguistic and semantic annotation, and worked towards creating a sound basis that would allow for more sophisticated research questions. The current version of the interface can be seen as a case example showing how the ABaC:us team provides improved access to these rare pieces of macabre literature that give fascinating evidence of Baroque culture and attitudes towards Life and Death.