Autor: Thomas Schmidt

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.

In der Sektion „Korpora in der angewandten Linguistik: Lehren und Lernen von Deutsch als fremder Sprache (auch) in Krisenzeiten“ des XV. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik stellten Christian Fandrych und Franziska Wallner am 21.7. 2025 die didaktischen Potenziale der ZuMult-Tools vor. Im Mittelpunkt standen die Darstellung der Nutzungsmöglichkeiten der Tools ZuMal, ZuViel, ZuHand und ZuRecht in der Sprachdidaktik, aber auch die noch bestehenden Grenzen und Einschränkungen der Tools. Im Anschluss wurden Perspektiven für eine Weiterentwicklung der Nutzungsmöglichkeiten aufgezeigt und diskutiert.

At the workshop „“Corpus linguistics 2040: Which data, which methods, which models?“ which took place at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language on July 10th and 11th, Thomas Schmidt, Anne Ferger and Elena Frick presented a poster on:
Multimodal data and qualitative exploration of audiovisual language corpora – the ZuMult corpus platform in 2025
The poster is available on Zenodo.

As on many other occasions of a similar kind, we felt it was our duty to remind the audience of the relevance of oral data and audiovisual language data. We did so by pitching our poster with a little poem:

Corpus linguists, be awoken
To the importance of the spoken token
Billions of written words are well and good
But language can be fully understood
Only by looking at its use in interaction
with speakers’ and listeners’ reactions,
Including the empirical reality
Inherent in multimodality,
the use of words in conversation,
The dialectal variation,
Stages of language acquisition
Under different conditions,
and not to forget: phonology.
For this, we need technology.
We have therefore invented
A platform that will be presented
In a much more detailed fashion
As part of our poster session.

We keep trying 😉

As part of the IPRA conference panel Corpus pragmatics – Methodological and empirical findings on the combination of qualitative and quantitative research in pragmatics, organised by Martin Luginbühl and Stefan Hauser, Thomas Schmidt presented a joint paper by Karola Pitsch, Anne Ferger and himself, entitled:

Beyond words – a case study in corpus approaches to interaction and multimodality

The paper focussed on the use of ZuMult with corpora containing massive amounts of video data and summarised ongoing work on that topic at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

At the conference Varietätenkontakt: Phänomene – Methoden – Theorien, Hans C. Boas, Margo Blevins and Thomas Schmidt held a workshop on TGDA 2.0 – An enriched Texas German Dialect Corpus for (comparative) corpus analyses in which they introduced conference participants to the new ZuMult platform for the Texas German Dialect Project.

Before the workshop, Thomas Schmidt honoured Margo Blevins and Hans C. Boas with the Lucky Luke Award, recognising their outstanding achievements in all things Texas German.

At the Symposium: Reading Concordances in the 21st Century at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Elena Frick presented our poster on:

Reading, listening to and watching concordances of audiovisual interaction corpora

The poster is now on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15094135

On April, 25th, Hans Boas, Margo Blevins and Thomas Schmidt will be presenting the ZuMult Corpus Platform of the Texas German Dialect Archive at the 49th Annual Symposium of the Society for German American Studies in Milwaukee.