10 October 2024 press release

The German National Library (DNB) and the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) are offering access to a special collection of contemporary German-language literature for researchers. To mark the 20th anniversary of the German Book Prize, linguistic patterns and structures in all 362 digitally available longlist titles can now be searched online in full text for for academic purposes.

Thanks to the KorAP corpus analysis platform, provided by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) and installed on the DNB infrastructure, researchers can immerse themselves in the world of outstanding literature. The texts are automatically provided with detailed annotations containing information on the basic form (lemma) and part of speech of each word, enabling complex scientific search queries. Researchers in linguistics and German studies thus have the opportunity to digitally explore this valuable collection of literature and gain new insights.

‘With this service, we are supporting modern, data-based research approaches. I am particularly pleased that we can make a real highlight available to academia with the longlist titles of the prestigious German Book Prize,’ says Frank Scholze, Director General of the DNB.

‘Today, large text collections play a central role in the observation and study of contemporary German language. However, literary texts have hardly been taken into account so far. This cooperation aims to change this and offers an opportunity to give appropriate consideration to the literary language, that is so important for the status and development of German,’ says Prof Dr Henning Lobin, Director of the IDS.

‘We are delighted by the interest shown by researchers in the literary texts that have ever been nominated for the German Book Prize. The 20th anniversary of the prize is a wonderful occasion to give researchers the opportunity to use the innovative platform of DNB and IDS to provide researchers with access to key literary works from the last two decades and thus support the academic analysis of contemporary language,’ says Peter Kraus vom Cleff, Managing Director of the Börsenverein, which organises the German Book Prize.

The KorAP instance with the corpus of German Book Prize novels is now available at the following link: https://korap.dnb.de/deutscherbuchpreis

Background

KorAP is an open-source corpus analysis platform that has been developed at the IDS and elsewhere since 2012 and is used primarily for the development and expansion of the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo) and other national reference corpora. KorAP is used for scientific research in more than 100 corpora at various locations, including at the IDS for the German Reference Corpus DeReKo and, as of now, also for the literature corpus at the DNB, which will contain not only the texts of the German Book Prize but also other fiction texts. With the prototypical implementation of KorAP@DNB, the DNB and IDS are investigating a possibility for comprehensive searches in distributed text and language data archives as part of their collaboration in the Text+ consortium of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI).

For over 100 years, the German National Library has been collecting, documenting and archiving all domestic publications in written, visual and audio form as well as German-language publications worldwide and those relating to Germany from 1913 onwards, and making them accessible to the public. It offers its comprehensive services globally at its two locations in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main and in digital form to the extent permitted by copyright law.

With the German Exile Archive 1933 - 1945 and the German Museum of Books and Writing, the German National Library also disposes of valuable and extensive special collections. Through readings, exhibitions, lectures and concerts, it regularly draws attention to its treasures and promotes book culture, reading culture and music culture with a colourful and top-class programme of events.

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