Die Digitalisierung des Darmstädter Tagblatts (1740–1986)

Drei Jahrhunderte deutscher Sprachentwicklung

Abstract

The Darmstädter Tagblatt (1740–1986) is one of the longest-running regional newspapers in the German-speaking world. Since 2019, it has been digitised, linguistically processed, and made freely accessible as part of a DFG-funded project conducted by the University and State Library Darmstadt (ULB) and Technical University of Darmstadt. The digitisation process poses both technical and legal challenges, particularly regarding layout and script recognition as well as the clarification of rights for individual contributions. The processed data are provided as TEI-XML full texts and made available via platforms such as TUdigit, WDB+, and CQPweb. This enables new applications in diachronic linguistic research. As demonstrated in this paper, the corpus supports analyses of morphosyntactic patterns and lexical developments spanning three centuries. Additional examples highlight the newspaper’s transformation from a publication focused on classified advertisements to a modern daily, as well as the geographical reach of Darmstadt in the 18th century.