About the project

Project Wulfila is a small digital library dedicated to the study of Gothic and other Old Germanic languages. Our primary goal is to provide linguistically annotated editions that can be downloaded in TEI format or browsed online, linked to a digital glossary, POS tags, and interlinear translations. The focus is on the Gothic Bible and minor fragments. We are also interested in preparing digital facsimile editions of relevant textbooks and other related resources that are in the public domain.

The project was hosted by the University of Antwerp, Belgium, from 1999 until early 2025, and is currently being transferred to another institution. For the time being, the site is hosted on a temporary server.

History

The project dates back to late 1996, when two graduates from Ghent University (Tom De Herdt and Steven Van Assche) posted fragments of the Gothic Bible to a student web server. The (distant) goal was a lemmatized edition where each word in the text would be a link, mainly inspired by the Perseus project. Though initially limited to the Gospels according to Mark and Matthew, the site generated some interest, and to our surprise, several people kindly offered help in digitizing the text. David Landau and Robert Tannert scanned and edited the greater part of Streitberg's edition, and by the end of 1997 the entire Gothic Bible was available.

In 1999, the website moved to a server at the University of Antwerp (UFSIA at that time). It was redesigned, scanning errors were corrected, we added interlinear translations and a simple search engine that accepted regular expressions. After that, the main site remained basically unchanged until May 2004.

In 2002, the website became part of a research project granted by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of the University of Antwerp, under the direction of Prof. J. Van Loon: “Een gelemmatiseerd, diachroon, elektronisch tekstcorpus van de Germaanse talen, inzonderheid het Nederlands” [a lemmatized, diachronic corpus for Germanic languages, especially Dutch] (New Research Initiative, March 2002 to April 2004). The Gothic text was cross-checked with the TITUS version, converted to TEI P4 XML, and automatically lemmatized and POS-tagged using a digital glossary and a formal model of Gothic inflectional morphology. We provided two facsimile editions and began work on the text entry of the Old Saxon Heliand. In May 2004, the website was rewritten from scratch using web standards. More details about the project can be found here or in the final report (in Dutch).

Roadmap

The website is currently maintained on a volunteer basis, as time allows. Priorities include:

Feel free to get in touch with suggestions!