Project Consortium

The consortium of the QUEST project consists of the project leaders Hamburg, who oversee the coordination of the work of the consortium, the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin, the Archiv für Gesprochenes Deutsch (AGD)/Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim and the University of Cologne. Due to the close cooperation with Mandana Seyfeddinipur the BBAW in Berlin is also involved through the 'Endangered Languages Documentation Programme'. The project partners are affiliated with various data and knowledge centres, which also participate in the QUEST network. They have expertise in the development of interdisciplinary standards and also in their adaptation to the specific features and needs of the sub-disciplines which they represent.

QUEST sees itself as an integral part of a network of infrastructures, institutions and initiatives whose goal is to create a research data infrastructure based on generally recognized standards.

University of Hamburg

The Hamburg group is composed of the Hamburg Center for Language Corpora (HZSK, spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Kristin Bührig), the long-term project INEL (“Grammatical Descriptions, Corpora and Language Technology for Indigenous Northern Eurasian Languages” at the Institute of Finno-Ugric Studies/Uralistics, Director: Prof Dr. Beáta Wagner-Nagy) and the Institute of German Sign Language and Communication of the Deaf (IDGS, Director: Prof. Dr. Annika Herrmann).

The HZSK, a certified CLARIN-D centre since its foundation in 2011 at the University of Hamburg, has created an institutional framework for the sustainable availability of primarily spoken and multilingual research data. In the framework of the CLARIN-D project and two projects of the Scientific Library Services and Information Systems (LIS) funding programme of the DFG, extensive previous work has been developed at the HZSK in areas relevant to the QUEST project, which will serve as the basis for future work.

INEL is an 18-year long-term project in the context of the The Academies Programme, which is co-financed by the German federal government and individual federal states and coordinated by the The Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. Its primary objective is the curation of existing materials of sometimes critically endangered languages in the Russian Federation with the goal of making them available for long-term linguistic and cultural use. The project is technically and methodologically based on the local infrastructure of the HZSK and extends the quality standards and methods of data curation developed there.

At IDGS, with its focus on Sign Language research, the creation of digital multimodal language data and corresponding tools has been an integral research area since the end of the 1980s. The main aims of the long-term Academy project DGS-Corpus at the IDGS, alongside the creation of a corpus of German Sign Language and a corpus-based dictionary, are also to make the resulting data available to the language community.

Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin

The Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin (ZAS, Director: Prof. Dr. Manfred Krifka) is one of the institutions of the Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V. (GWZ). The remit of the ZAS is the investigation of human language ability in general and its expression in individual languages. In addition to the four research areas of Laboratory Phonology, Language Development and Multilingualism, Syntax and Lexicon, and Semantics and Pragmatics, linguistic fieldwork has previously been conducted on languages with small numbers of speakers (among others in Malawi, South Africa and Tanzania). This and other relevant previous work at the ZAS is currently being intensified as part of the planning for a fifth research area on Language Documentation and Archiving. As a result, the creation and development of corpora of small languages will be permanently established at ZAS.

Archiv für Gesprochenes Deutsch / Institut für Deutsche Sprache

The Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim is the central non-university institution for the study and documentation of the contemporary usage and recent history of the German language.It therefore pursues research in many areas involved with the building, curating, archiving and providing of German language resources (corpora, dictionaries) and participates in several initiatives to build digital research data infrastructures. Since 1968, the archive for Spoken German (AGD) has been based at the IDS. The AGD is the central collection point for corpora of spoken German and has carried out extensive previous work on corpus technology (standards, tools, workflows) for spoken corpora, which it will bring to the project.

University of Cologne

For more than 30 years, the University of Cologne has been an internationally visible focal point in the field of general linguistics. It focusses on the comparison of languages according to general linguistic theories and the description and documentation of lesser-known languages. Cologne has also made a large contribution to the field of Digital Humanities in Germany since the 1990s. In 2013, in collaboration with the DCH (Data Center for the Humanities, Director: Prof. Dr. Andreas Witt), the university established a dedicated centre for research in metadata in the humanities.

The collaborative activities of the Departments of Linguistics and Digital Humanities and the constant support of the research infrastructure CLARIN have led to the establishment of the Language Archive Cologne (LAC), a digital language data repository whose further development has been supported by the BMBF since 2015.

Within the framework of the CLARIN Knowledge Center for Linguistic Diversity and Language Documentation, the centre has established a special set of procedures and measures for the curation and quality assurance of metadata, which are included as existing work in QUEST.