Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum

Sunday, May 22, 2016

Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum

Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum (TIR) is an FWF-funded research project (no. P 25495) conducted at the Department for Linguistics of the University of Vienna. Funding runs from 24^th June 2013 until 23^rd June 2016.

In addition the Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum (TIR) takes part in the project AELAW - Ancient European Languages and Writings (ISCH COST Action IS1407), supported by the European Union, active from 13^th April 2015 to 12^th April 2019. Further information on the AELAW-project you can find on the website of the project.

The project staff are:

Stefan Schumacher (project director)

Gudrun Bajc (project illustrator and photographer)

Martin Braun (system administrator)

Sindy Kluge (research and data entry)

Corinna Salomon (research and data entry)

The aim of the project is a comprehensive collection, display and linguistic analysis of the Raetic inscriptions in the form of an interactive online platform of the MediaWiki type. The project therefore comprises the following tasks:

Collecting all Raetic inscriptions hitherto known, including those of doubtful status.

Examining the original inscriptions, and documenting them, including photos, drawings and photogrammetry.

Collecting and examining the secondary literature concerning both the individual inscriptions, and Raetic language and script, archaeology, and history in general.

Creating a database and online interactive platform capable of displaying the inscriptions in an online corpus, with all aspects of the inscriptions (linguistic, archaeological, and graphematic data) documented exhaustively.

As of summer 2015, about a five sixths of the inscriptions have been autopsied and entered into the system. Information on the Raetic script, language and archaeology of the Raetic area is being added continuously in the form of pages for words, morphemes, phonemes and characters, and summary texts on relevant topics. For information on the structure of the system and help with navigating it, please consult How to use TIR.
Our project is a follow-up task to Lexicon Leponticum, and constitutes the next step towards a comprehensive online collection and edition of sources concerning the so-called North Italic alphabets. In the course of the project, the employment of free open-source software for the online presentation of scientific content in the humanities will be further improved and refined. The project aspires to set new standards in applying Web 2.0 tools within linguistic studies, and encourage the adoption of such collaboration and communication tools as MediaWiki for scientific purposes.