ALMA is an interinstitutional project carried out by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (HAdW), the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW), and the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz (ADW Mainz). Directed by Prof. Dr. Maria Selig (BAdW), Prof. Dr. Elton Prifti and Seniorprof. Dr. Dres. h.c. Wolfgang Schweickard (ADW Mainz), and Dr. Sabine Tittel (HAdW), the project runs three research units with, in all, six colleagues.
The project aims to investigate the interaction between language, knowledge, and scholarship in the Romance cultural sphere where, from the 12th until the 15th century, new, vernacular knowledge networks develop and the vernaculars – medieval French, Italian, Occitan, etc. – turn into complex languages of knowledge and scholarship.
The ALMA project combines methods of linguistics, text philology and the history of sciences with the Digital Humanities and ontology engineering. The rich textual tradition within Romance languages – with respect to two exemplary knowledge domains, namely ‘medicine’ and ‘law’ – will be made accessible through digital, multilingual text corpora. The corpus texts lay the empirical foundation for the reconstruction of the main concepts and concept networks of these knowledge domains. To integrate the project’s historico-philological research results into the Semantic Web, they will be transferred into Linked Open Data together with new, domain-specific, historicized ontologies. These ontologies consider the specificity of medieval explanation patterns, thereby extending the circle of their potential users far beyond the field of Romance Studies to all disciplines of sciences and the humanities focusing on historical data.
«ALMA, realmente un proyecto con alma», Xavier Casassas Canals.
Copyright:
1. Gui de Chauliac, Grande Chirurgie, Manuscript Bibliothèque Universitaire Historique de Médecine – Université de Montpellier, H 184 [2. third 15th c], folio 10vo. SCDI Montpellier – Service photographique.
2. Id., folio 14vo.
3. „Fresko, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Siena, Palazzo Pubblico, Allegoria ed effetti del buono e del cattivo governo“ [between 1338 and 1340]. Public domain.
4. „Chirurgia magna Chirurgia magna Guidonis de Gauliaco... nunc demum suae primae integritati restituta à Laurentio Jouberto, S. 40“. Wellcome Collection, CC-BY-4.0.
