Oral History meets Linguistics - Better access to language and text-based research data: The Free University of Berlin has been a member of the linguistics consortium ‘Text+’ of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) since January 2025. As one of 26 scientific consortia within the NFDI, ‘Text+’ promotes the sustainable use of language- and text-based research data in various disciplines. As a first step, the University Library of the Free University of Berlin is making numerous oral history interviews accessible in the ‘Text+’ infrastructure.

The first concrete project within the framework of the participation in ‘Text+’ is the cooperation project ‘Text+ interfaces to the interview collections in Oral-History.Digital’, or ‘Text+oh.d’ for short (https://www.fu-berlin.de/text_ohd), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The project, which is part of the University Library's ‘Digital Interview Collections’ department, aims to make this audiovisual research data from the ‘Oral-History.Digital’ portal accessible in the ‘Text+’ infrastructure.

The interview portal ‘Oral-History.Digital’ is an indexing and research platform for scientific collections of audiovisually recorded contemporary witness interviews. It currently lists 41 archives with 3773 interviews from 45 different institutions (https://www.oral-history.digital/). Through the further development of interfaces and the standard-compliant transformation of transcripts, extensive corpora from everyday oral language can be reused by the reaearch communities working with text- and language-based data.

On the one hand, the metadata of interview collections is recorded in the Text+ catalogue via an OAI interface; on the other hand, interview transcripts are made available in the ISO standard for spoken language of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) if the appropriate access authorisation is granted. In this way, the Free University of Berlin supports interdisciplinary co-operation between history and linguistics.

The NFDI aims to make decentralised, project-based and temporarily stored research data systematically accessible to the scientific community. According to the FAIR principles, research data should be sustainably findable, accessible, linkable and reusable. the Free University also participates in the NFDI in the geosciences consortium NFDI4Earth, in the history consortium NFDI4Memory and in the overarching NFDI association.

The ‘Text+’ consortium, led by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, brings together various data and competence centres from universities and academies in the areas of corpora and text collections, lexical resources, editions and infrastructure. Each year, it funds selected cooperation projects following a tendering process in order to continuously expand the data and services offered by Text+ and make them available to the research community in the long term. ‘Text+ohd’ is one of five collaborations funded in 2025. By participating in ‘Text+’, the Free university of Berlin can actively shape digital research, teaching and information infrastructures for the text- and language-oriented sciences.

Further information

    Website of ‘Text+ohd’: https://www.fu-berlin.de/text_ohd
    Website of ‘Text+’: https://text-plus.org/
    Website of ‘Oral-History.Digital’: https://www.oral-history.digital/
    Website of the NFDI: https://www.nfdi.de/
    Press release of the FU Berlin: https://www.fu-berlin.de/presse/informationen/fup/2025/fup_25_004-text-plus-konsortium-ohd/index.html