At work in the knowledge-stores of the world’s cultural heritage

The Academy is currently responsible for six long-term scientific projects in the framework of the Academies Programme:

  • The Long-term project Tamilex will create the first historical Tamil dictionary from January 2023. The goal is an electronic corpus accompanied by annotated translations and complete analytical glossaries for each word and its derivatives.
  • The Long-term Project INEL studies the indigenous languages of northern Eurasia, through digital empirical data collections (corpora). By this scholars secure knowledge of languages threatened with extinction.
  • The Long-term Project Formulae – Litterae – Chartae researches and edits early medieval formulae, used as models for legal charters and letters, which document the range of learned writing in western Europe in the early Middle Ages.
  • The Long-term Project Beta masaheft. The Writing Culture of Christian Ethopia and Eritrea is a systematic multimedia presentation of knowledge of this manuscript culture.
  • The Long-term Project Etymologika is dedicated to Greek-Byzantine etymological dictionaries, among the most important lexicographic achievements of ancient and medieval intellectual history in Europe.
  • The Long-term Project Development of a corpus-based electronic dictionary of German Sign Language has the goal of collecting the sign-language texts of the Deaf and making a part of them available to the public as a corpus; this Public DGS Corpus has already been published online.

Long-term Projects in the Academies Programme

The Academies Programme is the joint research programme of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities and serves to study, preserve and bring wider current attention to our cultural heritage. It is Germany’s largest long-term research programme in the humanities and social sciences and is unique worldwide. With their foundational research, designed for the long-term, the Academies make an indispensable contribution to the documentation of our cultural memory and to the formation of both national and transnational cultural identity. Since 1979/80, the Academies Programme has been funded jointly by the German Federation and Federal States. In 2021 it comprised a total volume of 70.8 million euros for 132 projects with around 900 staff at 191 research centres. Through the editions, dictionaries and text corpora that are produced, the Academies create central stores of knowledge for the future, which are available – increasingly also in digital form – for scholarship and for the public.

You can find more information about the Academies Programme and the Project Database of the Academies Programme on the website of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities.

An overview of all the Long-term Projects in the Academies Programme is available from AGATE – the research information system of the Academies of Sciences: To the AGATE Portal

“The Long-term Projects stand for work, reputation, renown and responsibility. They serve to study, preserve, interpret and present parts of the world’s cultural heritage – be it in the form of text, image, sculpture, sound or architecture. Sign language is a one-off in this, since the mimic-gestural ‘choreography’ of meaningful movements is unique.”