Project Wulfila is a small digital library dedicated to the study of Gothic and Old Germanic languages in general. 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 currently on the Gothic Bible and minor fragments; in addition, we are working on a lemmatized edition of the Old Saxon Heliand and – on a smaller scale – selected Middle and Early Modern Dutch documents. We are also interested in preparing digital facsimile editions of relevant textbooks and other related resources that have entered the public domain. The project is hosted by the University of Antwerp, Belgium.
The project dates back to late 1996, when Tom De Herdt and Steven Van Assche – two graduates from Ghent University – posted fragments of the Gothic Bible to a student webserver. The (admittedly distant) goal was a lemmatized edition where each word in the text would be ‘clickable’, mainly inspired by the Perseus project. Though it was 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 started working on text entry of the Old Saxon Heliand. In May 2004 the website was rewritten from scratch using webstandards (XHTML, CSS). More details about the research project can be found here or in the final report (in Dutch).
The website is currently maintained on a volunteer base, as time allows. Priorities: