Native-TEI dialectal dictionary for Bavarian dialects in Austria: data structure, software and workflow

This paper discusses the use of TEI in the creation of dually born-digital and print dictionary as part of the Dictionary of Bavarian Dialects in Austria (Wörterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich ‘WBÖ’). Also we discuss the creation of a lexicographic editor tool that allows the non-TEI expert lexicographers to create TEI articles in background of a user-friendly interface.

This work being carried out is a continuation of a legacy project which began in 1913 when data began to be gathered throughout the Bavarian dialect area of the Austrian Empire. The source material being used for the creation of the new articles was collected and elicited using questionnaires and recorded on paper slips. Vocabulary continued to be collected until the 1990’s when the analogue records were converted to a TUSTEP database. Recently the database of more than 2.4 million entries has been converted to TEI (Bowers & Stöckle 2018).

At the core of this project are several issues which are particularly significant in the TEI, notably: a) the use of TEI as primary data format for the creation of both a print and digital resource; b) the lexicographic editor tool which provides a user-friendly and open-source alternative to Oxygen XML editor in the creation of systematic and standardized TEI articles using ODD and YAML formatter; c) the structural approach to dialectal dictionary entries in TEI (an under-established/peripheral usage of the module). Herein we describe the specifics of each of these components of the project, focusing particularly on the TEI article structure and the editor tool.