Established in 2014 by the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste) in Düsseldorf, together with the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities (Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften) in Berlin, the Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan (Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya) at the University of Bonn investigates the hieroglyphic writing and language of the ancient Maya. In cooperation with the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB Göttingen), the project develops a digital text database, corpus-based dictionary, and interdisciplinary research environment for Maya inscriptions, images, linguistic analyses, and contextual information on text-bearing artefacts. The Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) later joined the project and contributed to the development of the research portal.

The project seeks to create a digital annotation platform for one of the most important works of German-Jewish philosophy: Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. The platform is to serve as an innovative tool for understanding the special manner in which Rosenzweig interweaves textual sources from diverse philosophical, religious, and literary traditions in the course of presenting the overarching vision of his book, and thereby for illuminating the broader German-Jewish reference culture of which Rosenzweig was a part. Aim is to create a digital annotation platform that: 1) enables side-by-side juxtaposition of the Star and its cited works; 2) facilitates the possibility for collaborative annotation to the registered community of Rosenzweig scholars; 3) produces a knowledge graph that makes use of Wikidata and displays the conceptual and cultural foci of Rosenzweig’s thought; and 4) enables flexibility and sustainability with an eye to the long-term viability of the platform from a technical and scientific perspective.

The corpus contains novels written by Spanish authors published between 1880 and 1939. The original corpus contains in total 358 prose texts, however, due to copyright issues, 219 can be published currently. The corpus is designed considering the data of two authoritative Histories of Literature and each text is annotated with several types of metadata. Further details on the corpus can be found below.