Text+ Newsletter #6

Welcome!

Welcome to the March 2026 edition of the Text+ newsletter! In this issue, we provide insights into current projects, events, and developments in the NFDI Text+ consortium and share news from the community.

The newsletter is published on our website and sent by email to all interested parties. If you would also like to receive it by email, please feel free to contact us.

You can also find the latest news from Text+ between newsletter issues on our social media channels. Follow us on LinkedIn and/or Mastodon.

We welcome any questions, feedback, or suggestions you may have – the best way to reach us is via the Text+ Office at office@text-plus.org.

Text+ Internal

First of all, we would like to inform you about the current status of Text+. As many of you already know, the application for funding for the second project phase was submitted in August 2025, with the Georg August University of Göttingen acting as the applicant institution. On 27 November 2025, the application and the work of Text+ were presented and discussed at the review meeting for NFDI continuation applications in Bonn.

On 15 January 2026, the reviewers’ comments and votes were received. Overall, these were very positive. The applicants had the opportunity to comment on the reviewers’ assessments, which they did.

In the next step, the NFDI Expert Committee will evaluate the review results and is expected to formulate a funding recommendation in March/April 2026. The GWK will make a final decision in June. This decision will then be communicated to the DFG, so that an official funding decision can be expected in August/September, provided that funding is approved. We are very optimistic that we will be able to successfully continue the next project phase in autumn 2026 with our existing team and new partners.

Parallel to the application process for a second funding phase, the work programme for the first funding phase of Text+ will continue in full until the end of September 2026. As a conclusion to this funding period, the Text+ Plenary, which will take place on 15 and 16 June 2026 in Mannheim, will provide an opportunity to present and jointly reflect on key results and experiences from all four task areas. Project participants will have the opportunity to present their work during a poster session. Further information on the poster session and the submission process can be found here.

All project participants, members of the expert community, other NFDI consortia, cooperation partners, and interested guests are invited to attend the plenary session. Participation is free of charge. Event language will be German. Registration is open until 15 May 2026.

Highlights from the Blog

In honor of World Standards Day on October 14, 2025, a NFDITalk Spezial was devoted to “Standards for FAIR Research Data.” Guest speaker Thorsten Trippel (Text+) discussed the role of norms and standards in research data management and their practical applications within the NFDI framework of. The complete presentation is available on YouTube. Additionally, Thorsten Trippel transformed the key points of his talk into six posts for the Text+ Blog (in German):
Part 1: Why Standards are Essential for Research Data Management
Part 2: The OAIS model: Standards for Archiving and Digital Long-term Availabiblity
Part 3: Persistent Identifiers: From DOI to ISO 24619
Part 4: Metadata Standards for Language Ressources: CMDI and ISO 24622
Part 5: Standards for Annotating Textual Data: TEI, SynAF and MAF
Part 6: How Standards Improve Research Cooperations

Other highlights include: Maret Nieländer (Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsmedien | Georg-Eckert-Institut, GEI) and Frank Wiegand (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, BBAW) talked about an update for the historical schoolbook corpus “GEI-Digital”; for the workshops series on “standardization of research data,” Marius Hug and Karoline Lemke presented the Basisformat des Deutschen Textarchivs, Marthe Klüster explained how to search and link letter editions with correspSearch, and Karoline Lemke introduced the edition humboldt digital. In the next part of the series, Jennifer Ecker, Pia Schwarz, and Rebecca Wilm will explain how to use the German Reference Corpus (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) for linguistic research – so be sure to check out the blog regularly.

Text+ Cooperation Projects

Text+ Cooperation Projects Funding 2025

In 2025, a total of five innovative cooperation projects were supported in the third round of Text+ funding. The funding phase began in January 2025 and ran until the end of the year. The selected projects reflect the breadth of Text+ content and address different data domains and infrastructural topics. The following projects received funding:

1. “Development of an open digital collection of historical music theory texts from the German-speaking world based on examples from the 19th century (DigiMusTh)”, submitted by Prof. Dr Fabian C. Moss (Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg) for the Collections data domain. More information about the DigiMusTh project can be found in the blog article.
2. “HAdW GND-based web services - Beaconizer & Discoverer (Hagrid)”, submitted by Dr Frank Grieshaber (Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities) in the Infrastructure/Operations domain.
3. “Glossarium Graeco-Arabicum - Open Data (GlossGA-OD)”, submitted by Dr Rüdiger Arnzen (Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen–Nuremberg) for the Lexical Resources data domain.
4. “LOD role modeling from the registers of Regestenwerke zum Mittelalter (LRM)”, submitted by Prof. Dr Andreas Kuczera (Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz) for the Editions data domain.
5. “Text+ interfaces to the interview collections in Oral-History.Digital (text+oh.d)”, submitted by Dr Cord Pagenstecher (University Library of the Free University of Berlin) for the Collections data domain.

We would like to thank all projects for their dedicated collaboration and their valuable contributions to the further development of data offerings and infrastructures within Text+.

On 17 February 2026, the completed projects presented their work and results at a virtual event and discussed them with the community. The event was aimed at all Text+ participants as well as the broader humanities and cultural studies community. The strong interest, constructive discussions, and positive feedback highlighted the added value of the projects and further strengthened professional exchange within the community.

Text+ Cooperation Projects Funding 2026

On 1 January 2026, the fourth round of funding for cooperation projects in the NFDI Text+ consortium began. Following a review process, five projects were once again selected for funding from the numerous applications submitted in spring 2025.

The following projects will receive funding:

1. “Digital Epigraphy – Maya Hieroglyphs in Text+ (IDIOM+)”, submitted by Dr. Christian Prager (NRW Academy of Sciences and Arts / Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) for the Editions data domain
2. “Developing a Cross-Linguistic Standard Representation Model for Frame-Semantic Data (MuLingFrames)”, submitted by Prof. Dr. Oliver Czulo (Institute for Translatology gGmbH) for the Lexical Resources data domain
3. “Early Modern Physicians’ Letters: Preparation, Data Harmonisation and Integration (FADE)”, submitted by Ines Röhrer (Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities) for the Collections data domain.
4. “Long-Term Availability and Integration of the Ancient Egyptian Dictionaries in the Network (AWV 2.0)”, submitted by PD Dr. Franziska Naether (Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig) for the Lexical Resources data domain.
5. “ISO 24624:2016 – Transcription of spoken language: Resources, Documentation and Multilingual Demo Corpus (Transcription+)”, submitted by Dr. Thomas Schmidt (University of Duisburg-Essen) for the Collections and Infrastructure/Operations data domains.

We warmly welcome the new cooperation projects and look forward to a stimulating and productive collaboration within the framework of Text+.

New Publications

Text+ maintains its bibliography on Zotero and presents a structured overview of it on its portal.

Harmonizing Language Data: Standards for Linguistic Resources

Standards are indispensable for a research infrastructure. They make research data findable, usable, and interoperable. The book published by De Gruyter

Bański, Piotr; Ulrich Heid; and Laura Herzberg (eds.): Harmonising Language Data: Standards for Linguistic Resources. De Gruyter, 2025

was developed in close collaboration with the Text+ community and provides a practical overview of key standards for language-related data. The main topics include metadata, annotations, long-term archiving, audio and video resources, and entity linking.

For researchers, developers, and anyone working with linguistic data, the book demonstrates how standards support collaboration, enhance reusability in research, and ensure the long-term usability of data.

The book is available in open access and can be downloaded free of charge https://doi.org/10.1515/9783112208212.

The Text+ Registry: Federating Research Data Catalogues for the Digital Humanities

Tobias Gradl, Leon Fruth, and Andreas Henrich have published a new article on the Text+ Registry:

Gradl, Tobias, Leon Fruth, and Andreas Henrich (2026). The Text+ Registry: Federating Research Data Catalogues for the Digital Humanities. In Wolf-Tilo Balke, Koraljka Golub, Yannis Manolopoulos, Kostas Stefanidis, und Zheying Zhang (Eds.), Linking Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (pp. 378–394). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05409-8_22.

The article presents the Text+ Registry, a central tool of the NFDI consortium Text+, which improves the discoverability and cataloguing of text- and language-based research resources. The registry connects different catalogues through a flexible architecture, enables both automated metadata harvesting and expert-based manual curation, and transparently documents the origin and development of the data.

Thanks to advanced search functions, multilingual search capabilities, the integration of authority data, and the use of persistent identifiers, resources can be efficiently discovered, integrated, and reused across domains. By following the FAIR principles, the registry provides a sustainable and interoperable foundation for future research infrastructures.

Follow-up Reports

Persona Workshop Organized by the Lexical Resources Task Area

On 26 January 2026, the Task Area Lexical Resources held a one-day workshop in Berlin to develop well-founded personas for potential and current users of central Text+ services – in particular the Registry (primarily from the perspective of the Lexical Resources task area, but also across task areas from the perspectives of Collections and Editions) and the Federated Content Search (FCS), including simple search, advanced search, and lexical search.

The workshop combined short input sessions with structured group work. The aim was to clearly identify typical user groups, their working methods, needs, and potential barriers. The three personas developed during the workshop will serve as a basis for optimising the search interface, guiding the strategic development of search and query functionalities (especially FCS), and documenting possible usage scenarios for Text+ services.

FAIR February 2026

This year marked the fourth edition of the FAIR February virtual event series organised by the Task Area Editions.

Since their publication in Scientific Data in 2016, the FAIR principles have become widely established as guiding principles within the digital humanities. In 2026, they celebrate their 10th anniversary, providing an opportunity for reflection and discussion: How has the landscape of digital editions changed over the past ten years? Is data being reused more frequently? Are resources better interconnected? What challenges will edition studies face in the coming years, and how can the FAIR principles support them?

On 5 February 2026, a panel discussion entitled “FAIR-nehmen und FAIR-geben” (“FAIR take and FAIR give”) focused on reuse and reusability. In the format of a speed talk – six questions in sixty minutes – four experts discussed what constitutes good reuse, how it can be achieved, and where obstacles remain. The panelists were Sven Jaros (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg), Caroline Odebrecht (Humboldt University of Berlin), Elena Spadini (University of Bern), and Peer Trilcke (University of Potsdam).

This was followed on 18 February 2026 by the “FAIR-netzen” meet-up, which focused on interoperability. Semantic web technologies, linked open data, and knowledge graphs illustrate that the (semantic) networking of digital resources now has its own history. Various knowledge bases and approaches have become established, with key components including standardised data and controlled vocabularies, knowledge databases, and machine-readable, structured formats. The discussion also addressed the question of whether FAIR data practices are conceivable without Linked (Open) Data (LO(U)D).

Further information about the event is available here.

Language and Text Data for Society, Health and Medicine

The two-day workshop on 5 and 6 March 2026, organised by the Task Area Collections in Text+, focused on language- and text-based research data in related disciplines, particularly in the fields of society, health, and medicine.

The workshop addressed concepts for the sustainable and secure provision, analysis, and reuse of research data. Among other topics, issues of multilingual communication and multimodality were discussed. The presentations covered a wide range of subjects, including doctors’ letters, regional languages, adult education course announcements, sign language corpora, forensic linguistics, and phonetics.

Workshop materials will gradually be made available on the event website.

Dates

Open FDM Consultation Hours at Humanities@NFDI

The new FDM consultation hours offered by Humanities@NFDI were recently launched. These monthly online consultations provide advice on all aspects of research data management for students, researchers, and staff at research and collection institutions.

Experts from the NFDI consortia NFDI4Memory, NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Objects, and Text+ are available for discussion and consultation. If required, more in-depth one-to-one conversations can take place in breakout rooms.

Participation takes place via Zoom and does not require prior registration. Further information and the dates for 2026 can be found here.

SSHOMP Training Series: Thematic Social Sciences

The SSHOMP Training Series: Introduction to SSH Open Marketplace invites participants to a new series of online workshops in 2026 focusing on key aspects of digital research practices in the social sciences and humanities.

Topics include the FAIR and CARE principles and the strategic use of the SSH Open Marketplace in everyday research. Using practical examples, participants will gain insights into tools, workflows, and curation processes that facilitate the management of research data and enhance its visibility and reusability.

At the same time, the series offers space for exchange and networking. Experiences from ongoing projects, community needs, and possible contributions to the SSH Open Marketplace can be discussed and further developed together.

The workshop series is aimed at a broad audience from the social sciences and humanities. Information on individual workshop topics, dates, and further details is available here.

Show and Tell: Tools, Services, Projects – the Text+ Event Series

In a three-part lecture series, the cross-consortium working group “Social Media Data in the NFDI” examines the Digital Services Act (DSA), which for the first time establishes a binding legal framework within the EU and enables researchers to access data from large online platforms for scientific purposes – under clearly defined conditions.

The series focuses on practical questions: What forms of data access does the DSA provide? For whom is it practically relevant? How can researchers submit applications? Legal, technical, and logistical challenges will also be addressed.

The sessions successively cover the basics of the DSA, access to non-public data via the EU data access portal, and the use of publicly available platform data. The first two presentations have already been summarised in the Text+ blog. The next presentation will take place online on 20 March 2026.

Registration is available here.

Archive

• 5. Newsletter from 11.02.2025
• 4. Newsletter from 29.10.2024
• 3. Newsletter from 29.10.2024
• 2. Newsletter from 15.07.2024
• 1. Newsletter from 30.04.2024