Since the early 1970s, the Middle High German Conceptual Database (MHDBDB) has served as a pioneering flagship project in / at the intersection of pre-modern German literary studies and Digital Humanities. Anchored at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research (IZMF) at the University of Salzburg and working closely with its partners such as the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (IMAREAL), it unites philological expertise with cutting-edge information technology. At its core lies an onomasiologically designed dictionary whose hierarchical conceptual system assigns every lemma attested in the corpus a precise, context-sensitive meaning. This architecture enables scholars to pursue not only word- or string-based queries but also complex semantic, narratological, and morpho-syntactic investigations.
The underlying reference corpus currently contains about 10.7 million tokens drawn from 666 text editions of diverse genres. Spanning roughly from 1050 to 1600, it captures multiple regional and varietal strands of Middle High German and is continuously expanded as a controlled monitor corpus. All texts are linguistically pre-processed—tokenised, lemmatised, POS-tagged, and partly disambiguated—and further enriched with grammatical features and extensive metadata that integrate the resource into a Linked Open Data ecosystem. A comprehensive migration financed by CLARIAH-AT (2016 – 2023) shifted the database to a graph architecture, introduced a new (beta) web interface, and enhanced the power of its faceted search engine. At the same time, full texts and their semantic layers were released as TEI-XML files on GitHub, allowing researchers to work with the data independently of the graphical frontend.
The MHDBDB is not merely a singular tool for investigating Middle High German lexis but also a sustainable research infrastructure whose open interfaces decisively support interdisciplinary projects.
Duration: online since 1992
Head of project: Dr. Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer
Contributors: Dr. Alan van Beek; Julia Hintersteiner MA