exploreAT! aims to reveal unique insights into the rich texture of the German language, especially in Austria, by providing state of the art tools for exploring the unique collection (1911-1998) of the Bavarian Dialects in the region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This corpus is large and rich, estimated to contain 200,000 headwords in around 4 Million records. The collection includes a five-volume dictionary of about 50,000 headwords, covering a period from the beginning of German language until the present. Further, there are a number of additional databases, such as an image database comprising of drawings and sketches made by the collectors to add to the information of the collected words. It is envisaged to create an interface to Linked Open Data (LOD) in order to integrate ontological resources, thus ensuring the representation of conceptual and semantic information. The project is innovative both from technical and humanities perspectives as there is a key interest in creating an effective, reusable, domain-tuned IT infrastructure for hosting historical-lexical content. It will include the connected and linked knowledge from European and Global infrastructures, which will facilitate scholarly and amateur inquiry from both shallow browsing to deep research from around the world. From a humanities perspective, the insight into how users interact with this content, and what riches they can discover in the corpus will likely greatly advance the knowledge of the evolution of German and human language in general.
