Konferensartikel

The paper presents core aspects of a project that examines word usage in the German controversy on women’s suffrage around 1900. The investigation is based on a variety of written texts (including journal articles, books, and pamphlets) that began to condense in the 1880s and developed into a complex thematic network until the introduction of women’s suffrage in 1918. The focus of this paper is the presentation of two infrastructure aspects. First, the corpus compilation (ongoing and already published to some extent) is accomplished in the CLARIN-D infrastructure component German Text Archive (“Deutsches Textarchiv”, hereafter DTA). This project exemplifies a basic user need: to make new corpus texts available from the very beginning of a project which can then be analyzed for the project’s purposes with the powerful search tool architecture of the DTA. This kind of strategy is a win-win situation for the author, for the infrastructure, and for the whole research community. Second, the dissertation and the text corpus will be accompanied by a lexical documentation on word usage in the discourse domain. This component relies heavily on standards and best practices adopted in the CLARIN-D community and in the ZHistLex-project. The results are to be published and hosted by one of the German CLARIN centers. This project is a use case with solutions that can be seen as generic for similar kinds of projects, be it dissertations, term papers or larger research projects.

women’s suffrage, First Women’s Movement, word usage, CLARIN-D, ZHistLex project, Deutsches Textarchiv, lexical documentation, dissertation project, infrastructure support