Romankorpus Frühneuhochdeutsch (Roko.UP): A Collection of Early Modern German Narrative Prose

Repository location

Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10462759

Context

The Roko.UP was collected as a part of the project ‘Wortstellung und Diskursstruktur in der Frühen Neuzeit’. The objective of this project is to evaluate the degree and manner in which discourse and narrative structure motivate word order phenomena in Early New High German.

The earliest text dates from the second half of the 15^th century, when fundamental changes in extra-linguistic conditions, such as changes in the history of media as well as changes in terms of the audience, led to a new literary beginning (Bertelsmeier-Kierst, 2014; Buschinger, 2010). The importance of narrative prose at the turn from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period is reflected in a rapidly growing number of prose novels in the form of manuscripts and prints. At the same time, a stronger authorial consciousness in conjunction with the newly emerging consciousness of fictionality (Müller, 1997) is found, which is often reflected in the narrator comments to the textual originals (Kellermann, 2010).

The nine prose novels from the 15^th and 16^th century are selected for their diverse background regarding the narrative traditions in which they were originally compiled (Bertelsmeier-Kierst, 2014, 2019). For this reason, the corpus contains prose versions based on Middle High German narrative poetry, adaptations of French and Latin poetry and prose, as well one text that is not modeled on another, that is, one that is originally composed as an Early New High German prose text.

Parts of the corpus and earlier compilations of the texts have been used in research papers (Bloom, forthcoming-a and Bloom, forthcoming-b), a master’s thesis (Purwin, 2023), and a dissertation in preparation (Reetz, ms).

Steps

The steps involved in the compilations of the corpus are visualized in Figure 1. Whenever needed, we returned to earlier steps in the procedure as indicated by the arrows.

Figure 1

The building of the corpus started with the digitization of the texts, wherever necessary, and the conversion into .txt-files. The editions were then verified and in case of Huge Schapler, Der Goldene Esel, Pontus und Sidonia, Wilhelm von Österreich and Wigalois, (parts of) the text needed to be (partially) re-done using either a different edition, or completing the text. For the final version of the corpus, the digitizations of Tristrant und Isalde and Wigalois vom Rade that had previously been made available in a digital .doc-format (INST 336/90-1) were included. For Melusine, Die schöne Magelone, Fortunatus and Huge Schapler digitized versions from Müller (1990) were used. Pontus und Sidonia (Fassung B) (Anonymous, 2nd half 15th. c.) and Der Goldene Esel were newly transcribed.

The texts were subsequently clause-separated by marking the clause boundaries in Notepad by means of a line break so that every finite clause is presented on their own row. In case of center-embedded finite clauses, it was decided that they would be separated from their matrix clause, as illustrated in (1).

The purpose of the clause-separation is to be able to straightforwardly extract and annotate particular word orders in finite clauses and clause types without losing the wider discourse-context and overview of the narrative structure. The files were subsequently systematized and proofread. Whenever necessary, this process was repeated.

Quality control

For the systematization of the files, we have decided to keep relatively close to the sources regarding orthography and no insertions of missing words were made. The transcription was reported as in the editions, including capitalization, but paragraph signs (e.g., before the header in Figure 2) and virgules (at the end of the fourth line from below in Figure 2) have been removed. Word-breaks and extra spaces have been resolved.

Figure 2

Abbreviations, as for example shown in the last word of the second line in Figure 2, were written out consistent with the available transcriptions of the other texts. Double majuscules at the beginning of episodes (illustrated below the illustration in Figure 2) were presented by two capital letters (ES). When the initial letter has become unreadable, the letter has been added. Diacritics with a superscript o (e.g., <ů>) are transcribed as such and diacritics with a superscript e are represented by a colon followed by an e, e.g., <u:e>.

Any deviation from the original manuscript is surrounded by angle brackets (<>) and listed in the Readme file, where further information and text-specific notes can be found as well.

Titles and picture headings (Simmler, 2013), as illustrated in Figure 2, were indicated by blank rows surrounding the header. Page numbers are represented between two hashtags in each file (e.g., #100#). In case of page breaks within words, the page number is presented directly before or after these words to avoid word breaks. The reported page numbers reflect the numbering of the reported sources. As a result, for texts that have been directly transcribed from the original manuscript the page number may come in a format in which the page number is complex and includes a section letter, which is capitalized; a numeral – Roman or Arabic – that represents the page number; an ‘r’ or ‘v’, labeling the face (recto) or back (verso) of the folio; and ‘a’ or ‘b’ to mark the columns (Clemens & Graham, 2007).

To ensure systematicity in the clause-separation, three annotators first annotated the same 100 lines. Based on this pilot annotation, instructions were written out, which were used for further annotation and updated upon discussion. Any disagreements and difficult cases were resolved through discussion. In particular, afinite constructions (Breitbarth, 2005; Demske, 2022) and sequences in which preverbal adverbs were followed by adverbial clauses (Bloom forthcoming-a) repeatedly caused difficulties and had to be discussed and revisited. In the end, each text was clause-separated by at least one data curator, and systematized and proofread by another.

Object name

Romankorpus Frühneuhochdeutsch (Roko.UP)

Format names and versions

Text files (.txt) with UTF-8 encoding.

Creation dates

2021-08-01 – 2023-11-25.

Dataset creators

• Ulrike Demske: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Resources, Validation, Manuscript transcription, Universität Potsdam

• Barthe Bloom: Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Universität Potsdam

• Malika Reetz: Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Writing, Universität Potsdam

• Luisa Boeckmann, Johann Heidrich, Alona Prozorova & Jette Purwin: Data curation, Universität Potsdam

• Peter Neumann: Transcription of Pontus und Sidonia

• Sanne-Helen Taubner: Transcription of Der Goldene Esel

Language

Early New High German

License

CC-BY4.

Repository name

Zenodo, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10462759

Publication date

2023-11-28