Infrastructure and research projects

Researchers in language and the humanities produce a lot of data, such as digital dictionaries, text corpora, speech and video recordings, literary and historical archives and experimental data - everything to do with language. These data should not be put in a drawer but should be made available to other researchers and students. CLARINO is a national infrastructure which makes these data available through advanced tools and online services. It supports research across borders in cooperation with 25 countries. The present project CLARINO+ is upgrading this infrastructure so that it can offer better data, tools and services. The project is making the infrastructure better known among potential users and is organizing user support and training.

More information can be accessed via the Project Bank of the Research Council of Norway. Resource pages for tools, tree bands and digital archives can be accessed on the repository page of the CLARINO Bergen Centre.

Asbjørnsen and Moe's folktales, legends about Huldra and the Hulder people and ballads such as Draumkvedet are important elements of Norwegian culture. The fairy tales are read, the ballads are sung and most people have an idea of what huldra might look like. Nevertheless, the original sources of this folk culture are scarcely available. SAMLA will therefore digitize the archive material and and make it available in three central Norwegian traditional archives: Norwegian Folklore Collection at the University of Oslo, Norwegian Ethnological Research at the Norwegian Folkemuseum Foundation and Ethnofolklore Archive at the University of Bergen. These archives contain rich cultural historical material that will be made available on the website samla.no as a joint digital archive. Samla.no will make it possible to search for different individual phenomena and variants of individual stories, while at the same time it will be possible to search across archives, genres and material categories.

The technical infrastructure is developed and maintained by the University of Bergen Library.

This project proposes the first comprehensive study of the full impact of Birgitta and her Revelations on medieval England. How were her texts received and circulated, and what was the extent of her influence? A bold overarching hypothesis will be tested: that from around 1380 until the English Reformation in the 1530s, Birgitta was in fact the most influential female author in medieval England, indelibly shaping English society - and, at the same time, the English also shaped Birgitta and her texts to fit their own needs and tastes, sometimes through dramatic adaptation.

In order to test this hypothesis, the project combines three innovative methodologies. First, we will create a multi-faceted, open-access database of English manuscripts and other evidence related to Birgitta. Second, select Middle English versions of Birgitta's Revelations will be edited for the first time, in both print and digital editions. Third, we will produce network graphs that can illuminate how Birgitta's texts circulated in England, and how her influence spread.

In collaboration with project participants are developers at Digital Utvikling working on creating a beta version of the "DIGITAL BIRGITTA" online resource and initial stages of the development of graphical visualization of manuscript relationships.

The database can be reached on the webpage of Digital Birgitta.

The starting point for this project is the need to gather and present the extensive and scattered resources that deal with Edvard Grieg on a future-oriented platform and gain access to these in line with the dynamic development of knowledge within music research.

The Grieg Research Guide provides easy access to a continuously updated Grieg bibliography based on the bibliography in the Grieg Gesamtausgabe. This will be expanded with references from indexed international databases, hitherto unpublished national library catalogs and digitized primary sources.

The bibliography section relates to a scientifically edited catalog of works, also made available for the first time in an online version. Thus, it will be possible to make related searches in both music manuscripts and other primary sources in addition to the secondary literature.

In addition, a rating and comment function was developed, which allows for a discussion of current topics based on the researchers' professional assessments and comments from the public. The project is a cross-institutional collaboration between the University of Bergen Library, Bergen Public Library and the Center for Grieg Research.

More information about the project can be found via the Project Bank of bibliotekutvikling.no.

The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB) was funded in 1990 and is a research infrastructure and projects platform bringing together philosophy, editorial philology and text technology. WAB is probably best known for the publication of «Wittgenstein's Nachlass. The Bergen Electronic Edition» (BEE, Oxford University Press 2000). 

BEE offers normalized and diplomatic text editions of the manuscripts and typescripts of Wittgenstein's philosophical Nachlass. The edition is equipped with a range of search and analysis functions. Since 2014, WAB is producing a new digital facsimile of the Wittgenstein Nachlass which is made available open access on the Wittgenstein Source site. Moreover, WAB gives since 2016 interactive open access to all its transcriptions of the Wittgenstein Nachlass on the interactive dynamic presentation (IDP) site. On the semantic faceted search and browsing (SFB) site, WAB offers in addition semantic faceted search and browsing of Wittgenstein metadata, again with a focus on Wittgenstein's philosophical Nachlass. And finally, WAB offers with WiTTFind, a cooperation with the Centrum für Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung an der Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, advanced tools for Nachlass text search.

The project consisted of a digitization and complete text-critical republishing of Holberg's collected writings and the preparation of these for the general public and for research. The project established reliable, text-critical editions of Holberg's works, and disseminate the works to both researchers and a wider public. The texts are provided with comments and introductions, which both help to ensure immediate understanding and place Holberg's texts in a wider literary and historical context. The project was a collaboration between the University of Bergen, Uni Digital (a division of Uni Research, Bergen), the Danish Language and Literature Society (DSL), and the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Online resource can be accessed on holbergsskrifter.no.

Digital Development is responsible for the development of various infrastructures connected to the Language Collection. Here, we  operate, upgrade and further develop three of the central Norwegian dictionaries, Termportalen and the Norwegian Place Name Archive's digital collections. This work is funded to a large extent via the Language Collections and Clarino+.

The dictionary project is part of an upgrade in collaboration with the revision project and the Norwegian dictionary Æ-H. The project is financed by the Department of Culture. The Bokmål and Nynorsk dictionary can be accessed on ordbokene.no.

The termportalen is part of the Norwegian investment in terminology and technical language. This project is co-financed by the Department of Culture and the Ministry of Science and Technology. Termportalen can be accessed on term.uib.no.

The Norwegian Place Name Archive's digital collections consist of a new national place name portal as well as a number of older place name databases that were moved to Bergen together with the archives of the Language Collections from the University of Oslo in 2016.