Timm Lehmberg

SusTEInability of linguistic resources through feature structures

This article shows that the TEI tag set for feature structures can be adopted to represent a heterogeneous set of linguistic corpora. The majority of corpora is annotated using markup languages that are based on the Annotation Graph framework, the upcoming Linguistic Annotation Format ISO standard, or according to tag sets defined by or based upon the TEI guidelines. A unified representation comprises the separation of conceptually different annotation layers contained in the original corpus data (e.g. syntax, phonology, and semantics) into multiple XML files. These annotation layers are linked to each other implicitly by the identical textual content of all files. A suitable data structure for the representation of these annotations is a multi-rooted tree that again can be represented by the TEI and ISO tag set for feature structures. The mapping process and representational issues are discussed as well as the advantages and drawbacks associated with the use of the TEI tag set for feature structures as a storage and exchange format for linguistically annotated data.

Digital Text Collections, Linguistic Research Data, and Mashups: Notes on the Legal Situation

Comprehensive data repositories are an essential part of practically all research carried out in the digital humanities nowadays. For example, library science, literary studies, and computational and corpus linguistics strongly depend on online archives that are highly sustainable and that contain not only digitized texts but also audio and video data as well as additional information such as metadata and arbitrary annotations. Current Web technologies, especially those that are related to what is commonly referred to as the Web 2.0, provide a number of novel functions such as multiuser editing or the inclusion of third-party content and applications that are also highly attractive for research applications in the areas mentioned above. Hand in hand with this development goes a high degree of legal uncertainty. The special nature of the data entails that, in quite a few cases, there are multiple holders of personal rights (mostly copyright) to different layers of data that often have different origins. This article discusses the legal problems of multiple authorships in private, commercial, and research environments. We also introduce significant differences between European and U.S. law with regard to the handling of this kind of data for scientific purposes.