ZuMult

Two more publications on ZuMult are now available in open access:

Schmidt, Thomas; Ferger, Anne & Frick, Elena (2026): Putting things on top of other things: The ZuMult platform for multimodal corpora and its ecosystem. In: Grisot, Christina et al. (Hrsg.): Selected Papers of the CLARIN Annual Conference 2025. https://doi.org/10.3384/ecp222.1601

Schmidt, Thomas; Blevins, Margaret; Boas, Hans & Gilbert, Glenn (2026): The Texas German Dialect Project Corpus as a Diachronic Resource for Investigating Language Contact. In: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP — A Resource Perspective. ELRA, 221–229. https://doi.org/10.63317/3s622jzdgwuj

ZuMult was also presented at the following occasions:

The International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA) in Edmonton, Canada:

Schmidt, Thomas & Pitsch, Karola: Search, Zoom in, Freeze, Zoom out, Switch, Freeze, … – Supporting video analysis in a corpus platform. Panel „Data in CA: Preparing, sharing, and reusing recordings from naturally occurring interaction continuation“, Sunday, June 28, 2026.

Netzwerktag „Digitalität in den Geisteswissenschaften“, Universität Duisburg-Essen:

Pitsch, Karola; Bergmann, Felix; Ferger, Anne & Schmidt, Thomas: Korpora und Forschungsdatenmanagement in der AG Multimodale Kommunikation, Soziale Interaktion & Technologie. Hochschulöffentlicher Netzwerktag „Digitalität in den Geisteswissenschaften“, Universität Duisburg-Essen, 30. Juni 2026.

Our work on setting up a ZuMult Instance for the Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP) is the topic of a paper recently published in Language Resources & Evaluation:

Boas, Hans C., Schmidt, Thomas & Blevins, Margo (2026). A new corpus platform for the Texas German Dialect Project. Language Resources & Evaluation 60 (52). Springer.

The paper can be accessed directly at https://rdcu.be/fp6xf.

Bei der Methodenmesse der 62. Jahrestagung des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Sprache „Deutsch im europäischen Sprachraum: Stand und Perspektiven“ am 11. März 2026 war ZuMult mit zwei Beiträgen vertreten, die jetzt auf Zenodo verfügbar sind:

Schmidt, T., Abouda, L., Badin, F., Boas, H. C., Blevins, M., Bührig, K., Dugua, C., Fandrych, C., Ferger, A., Frick, E., Kompiel, P. A., Miecznikowski-Fuenfschilling, J., Pagenstecher, C., Pitsch, K., Schwendemann, M., Skrovec, M., Verdonik, D., Wallner, F., & Wörner, K. (2026). Die ZuMult-Plattform als Instrument für sprachvergleichende Analysen auf mündlichen Daten. 62. Jahrestagung des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Sprache: Deutsch im europäischen Sprachraum — Stand und Perspektiven, Mannheim. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18983100

Lösel, A., Messner, A., Schwendemann, M., & Wallner, F. (2026). ExpoKo – Werkzeug und Ressource für das wissenschaftliche Schreiben. 62. Jahrestagung des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Sprache. Deutsch im europäischen Sprachraum – Stand und Perspektiven, Mannheim. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19115807

UT Austin and linguisticbits.de have released a new version of the ZuMult platform for the 𝗧𝗲𝘅𝗮𝘀 𝗚𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗗𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 (TGDP). Besides additional transcribed interviews from the TGDP, an additional annotation layer for Universal Dependency POS tags, and a couple of improvements to the frontend (streamlined navigation, improvements to the KWIC display and more), this new version also contains the „𝗵𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹“ 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗚𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗻 𝗚𝗶𝗹𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝟭𝟵𝟲𝟬𝘀 with speakers of Texas German. This adds a diachronic dimension to the study of Texas German.

The new version is at https://tgdp-zumult.la.utexas.edu/index.jsp.

The first French publication on ZuMult has recently been published:

Schmidt, Thomas (2025): Représenter et accéder à la parole dans les corpus oraux : diversification et adaptation des méthodes et technologies. Représenter la parole: Apports à une dimension fondamentale de la linguistique, edited by Layal Kanaan-Caillol, Céline Dugua and Annette Gerstenberg, De Gruyter, 2026, pp. 185-208.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110988833-009

Elena Frick and Thomas Schmidt’s publication on querying spoken language data is out. It gives an overview of different approaches to querying spoken language corpora and uses ZuMult as one way of illustration.

Frick, Elena and Schmidt, Thomas (2025). „Querying spoken language data“. Harmonizing language data: Standards for linguistic resources, edited by Piotr Bański, Ulrich Heid and Laura Herzberg, De Gruyter, 2025, pp. 339-376.

The publication is available in Open access: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783112208212-014

On October 1st, Anne Ferger and Thomas Schmidt presented ZuMult at the CLARIN Annual Conference 2025 in Vienna. A special emphasis of the presentation was on the way in which ZuMult builds on existing, established standards, practices and technology. The title of the talk reflected this with a reference to Monty Python:

Putting things on top of other things — The ZuMult platform for multimodal corpora and its ecosystem

The slides are on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17244827

On the occasion of the „Markt der Möglichkeiten“ (Market of Opportunities) at the 5th NFDI4Culture Community Plenary at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, Anne Ferger and Thomas Schmidt presented a „re-relase“ of the poster „Multimodal data and qualitative exploration of audiovisual language corpora – the ZuMult corpus platform in 2025“ (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15868734) to an audience of researchers and data management specialists in the NFDI4Culture Consortium for Research Data on Material and Immaterial Cultural Heritage.

At the poster session of the concluding conference „Große Lernerkorpora – Möglichkeiten und Grenzen“ (Large learner corpora: opportunities and limitations) of the DAKODA project, ZuMult was present with two posters:

ExpoKo – eine Korpusressource für das wissenschaftliche Schreiben (Elena Frick, Andrea Lösek, Annalena Messner, Thomas Schmidt, Matthias Schwendemann, Franziska Wallner) introduced the ExpoKo corpus, a growing collection of student exposés, mostly written by students with German as a second language. The corpus will be made available for research into learner corpora and German as a foreign language via a ZuMult instance. An abstract and the poster itself are available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17207105

ZuMult – Ein Multi-Tool für den didaktischen und linguistischen Zugang zu Korpora (Christian Fandrych, Anne Ferger, Elena Frick, Karola Pitsch, Thomas Schmidt, Matthias Schwendemann, Franziska Wallner) gave an overview of the platform itself focusing on its use for learner corpora and introducing some recent developments. An abstract and the poster itself are available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17205428

As part of the International Workshop of Embodied Interaction & Embodied Intelligence [EC]² in Essen on August 21st and 22nd, Thomas Schmidt, Anne Ferger, Felix Bergmann and Karola Pitsch presented a work-in-progress report on the ZuMult installation at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

The talk was titled
Complex Interactional Corpora: Workflows and Platform for video-based Studies of Embodied Interaction and Human-Machine Interaction
and introduced an international audience of interaction and human-machine communication researchers to GI-based workflows and the ZuMult platform.