Projects

Research projects I am or was involved in, with links to databases, editions, code and project pages.

Middle High German Conceptual Database (MHDBDB)

Period
since Nov 2023
Role
Senior Scientist (since Nov 2023, with interruptions)
Institution
Department of German Studies, University of Salzburg
Funding
University of Salzburg; sub-projects funded by CLARIAH-AT (BMFWF)

The MHDBDB is a research infrastructure for Middle High German language and literature, started in 1992 by Horst P. Pütz (Kiel) and Klaus M. Schmidt (Bowling Green) and hosted at the University of Salzburg since 2002. It holds 667 texts with lemmatisation, part-of-speech tags and links to a concept system. Between 2024 and 2026 the entire data set was migrated from RDF to TEI. The data is openly available on GitHub and Zenodo; the new interface MHDBDB Next runs on the TEI files without a database server, while MHDBDB Graph remains as the RDF access.

My contribution: Data migration and curation of the TEI corpus, user acceptance testing for MHDBDB Next, project coordination and grant applications, TEI documentation, XPath and XSLT scripting.

Sub-projects

  • Oct 2024 – Dec 2026
    Users First. Optimierung von User Interface, User Experience und Crowdsourcing an der Mittelhochdeutschen Begriffsdatenbank Funding: CLARIAH-AT (BMFWF) Stabilising MHDBDB Graph (RDF) and building MHDBDB Next (TEI). Users can contribute records and check automatically generated data. Responsible: Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer, Julia Hintersteiner, Alan Lena van Beek.
  • Oct 2024 – Dec 2026
    MHDBDB goes AI. Datenaufbereitung für das OER-LLM ParzivAI Funding: CLARIAH-AT (BMFWF) Preparing the MHDBDB data in open formats (TEI, RDF, JSON, plain text) and an open API for lemma queries as material for ParzivAI, an LLM for translating Middle High German texts (prototype: Florian Nieser and Thomas Renkert, Heidelberg). Responsible: Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer, Julia Hintersteiner, Alan Lena van Beek. Includes the hackathon “Von historischen Daten zu KI” (Salzburg, October 2025).

WB meets MHDBDB: The Wenceslas Bible as a pilot model for interoperable editions

Period
Aug 2025 – Dec 2026
Role
Principal investigator
Institution
University of Salzburg
Funding
CLARIAH-AT small-scale projects call 2025 (BMFWF)

Integration of the Wenceslas Bible, a Bohemian prose translation of the Bible (c. 1390), into the MHDBDB. Around 150,000 words from five biblical books were lemmatised and POS-tagged in a three-stage pipeline of automation, LLM assistance and manual review; names were aligned with LOD vocabularies (Wikidata, CIDOC CRM, Iconclass). New lexicon entries cover Bohemian-influenced spellings and Old Czech glosses. The Wenceslas Bible has been searchable in the MHDBDB since May 2026 (siglum WZB) with 95.3 % lemma coverage. The pipeline can be reused to ingest further texts.

The Wenceslas Bible – Digital Edition and Analysis

Period
Feb 2022 – Oct 2024 · new project phase from Oct 2026
Role
Research associate (Sep 2022–Nov 2023); image annotation and Python scripting as university assistant (2024–2025)
Institution
Department of German Studies, University of Salzburg · Lead: Manfred Kern
Funding
State of Salzburg (project phase 2022–2024)
Partners
Austrian National Library, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Department of Computer Science, University of Salzburg

Complete digital edition of the Wenceslas Bible, the richly illustrated German Bible translation made c. 1390–1400 for King Wenceslas IV and held by the Austrian National Library: facsimile, transcription, reading text and Vulgate synopsis, plus analysis of the image programme and of text–image relations. The edition is published on the Austrian National Library's edition platform; Genesis to Joshua have been available with transcription, reading text and synopsis since September 2025.

My contribution: Image annotation workflows, iconographic and semantic analysis of text–image relations, controlled vocabularies, evaluation of computer-assisted image analysis (object and face detection) and Iconclass classification with a RAG pipeline.

Peter Handke Notizbücher. Digitale Edition

Period
Oct 2025 – Sep 2028 · phase 2
Role
Software developer, Research & Data Services (since Mar 2026)
Institution
Austrian National Library · Lead: Bernhard Fetz, Literary Archive of the ÖNB
Funding
FWF (lead agency) and DFG
Partners
Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, German Literature Archive Marbach, Research & Data Services of the ÖNB

Edition of Peter Handke's notebooks as facsimile with transcription, commentary and indexes, edited by Katharina Pektor, Ulrich von Bülow and Bernhard Fetz. Phase 1 (online since June 2024) covers 22 notebooks from 1976 to 1979; phase 2 revises the existing material and edits 26 further notebooks up to February 1986.

My contribution: Software development for the edition platform.

ÖSZD-ExilBriefe: Stefan and Lotte Zweig's letters from exile

Period
Jan 2025 – Jun 2026
Role
Project staff (Nov 2025–Jul 2026): digitisation and metadata capture in TEI-XML
Institution
Literaturarchiv Salzburg, University of Salzburg · Lead: Lina Maria Zangerl

Cataloguing, digitisation and publication of around 500 letters from the estate of Stefan and Lotte Zweig, given to the University of Salzburg by the heirs in 2024: correspondence between Stefan and Lotte Zweig, with family members and with contemporaries from the years in exile. The letters are integrated with metadata into the platform Stefan Zweig digital, which has been reconstructing Zweig's dispersed estate since 2016.