UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies

Professor Timothy Tangherlini (UCLA, Scandinavian), with the assistance of Aurelijus Vijunas (PhD, UCLA)and Kryztof Urban (PhD, UCLA), is developing an automated Old Icelandic morphological analyzer and English language look-up tool that will attach to Old Norse/Old Icelandic texts, both in diplomatic transcription and in normalized form. Currently using the Fornaldar sögur (Legendary Sagas) as the test text platform, the project is in the process of extending it incrementally to include the majority of Old Icelandic prose texts.

Over the course of the project, the goal is to develop automated disambiguation routines, and then apply these routines to standard edition (normalized) texts, and to automatically marked-up diplomatic editions of manuscript variants of Fornaldar sögur. The project is also developing orthographic normalization routines that will greatly expand the reach of the morphological analyzer to all texts written in Old Icelandic.

In the coming two years, the project will increase the size of the lexical database by incoporating headwords and definitions from the standard English language dictionary of Old Icelandic (Cleasby-Vigfusson), as well as the headwords from the Old Icelandic dictionary, Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog (ONP). The disambiguation routines, orthographic normalization routines, and increased lexical set will allow for more precise and meaningful queries to an increasing corpus of digitized Old Icelandic texts allowing use of textual analysis tools, visualization tools, and clustering routines. The morphological analyzer; the disambiguation and orthographic normalization routines; the expanded lookup tool and lexical database; and the XML marked Standard Edition and diplomatic edition texts will be incorporated into a digital text environment allowing users the opportunity to study texts in a rich, meaningful way, all on-line.