About the project
The focus of the joint project “QUEST”, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), is the development of quality standards and curation criteria as well as the subsequent testing of methods of quality assurance in the field of heterogeneous digital language data. The project focuses on research data resulting from empirical research in the areas of language documentation, language contact and multilinguality. These consist of extensively processed empirical resources (corpora), mostly consisting of audio and/or video recordings, their transcriptions (textualization of spoken / signed language) and other descriptions such as annotations and metadata for the cataloging of resources and resource components. Given their heterogeneity and in some cases highly specialized characteristics, these resources place very high demands on the definition of any standards and evaluation criteria which, probably for that reason, have been inadequately established up to now. In addition, the potential for subsequent use of the data far exceeds the original domains, so that the quality standards and curation criteria to be developed will be of great use for the research data management of audiovisual data in the humanities in general.
The project is divided into three sub-goals:
- The first sub-goal is a comprehensive evaluation of existing quality standards, i.e. existing data-technical and documentation standards and data-type-specific quality criteria, based on existing data from the participating research data centres, with regard to their suitability and relevance in the context of creating and archiving such resources.
- Based on this, the second sub-goal is the development of curation criteria, i.e. data enrichment and transformation techniques which optimize the potential of such quality-assured data for interdisciplinary reuse or for application of the data in the context of a Third Mission.
- The third sub-goal is the implementation, at the data centers involved, of concrete methods of quality assurance which will guide and support the construction and processing of audiovisual language data according to the quality standards and curation criteria which have been developed. A semi-automatic system for evaluation, subject-specific review and, if applicable, final certification will be developed and tested.