RIDICS – website
Hosting institution: Institute of the Czech Language, CAS
Partner institution: Czech Technical University in Prague
RIDICS will co-create and operate 2 complementary web portals facilitating and inspiring research in the field of diachronic Czech studies (i.e. Czech from the earliest periods up to the late 18th century) and other related fields. The research web portal will provide access to a vast number of miscellaneous scientifically processed and analysed primary and secondary resources, including full texts of Czech writings resources, dictionaries, grammars and bibliographical databases, it will therefore provide researchers with tools appropriate for their research such as metadata, full text search, corpus analysis tools, lemmatisation and morphological annotation and intertextual relations. The community web portal will enable researchers to share their research outputs (store and make works and electronic editions of primary sources accessible), keep up with events in individual fields and discuss scholarly issues. RIDICS will also develop and offer tools for the primary sources preparation and research, e.g. template for electronic editions or software for computer assisted transcription. These will be available in the form of web services, individual programs or add-ons for programs, with which researchers work on everyday basis (text editors). Cooperation of RIDICS with research infrastructures CNC and LINDAT/CLARIN is expected in terms of data and tools exchange, cooperation in tool development and providing expert opinions. On the international level, RIDICS will be involved in projects concentrating on language resources preparation (DiXiT – Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network) or on digital lexicography (eNeL – European Network of e-Lexicography).
Future development
RIDICS will focus on preparing and distributing new documents and materials, on refinement of existing primary and secondary resources and on improving developed tools. The research infrastructure will expand its support of individual research projects, in terms of resources and tools for analysis preparation or customization. RIDICS will also integrate existing or new relevant resources from other research projects.
Socio-economic impact
RIDICS will help to improve the preservation of language cultural heritage and knowledge of national language, literature and history. It will provide access to primary and secondary materials and ensure their extensive use. Community web portal will establish a basis for interdisciplinary cooperation and by mutual interlinking of various data sources, the reading comprehension of presented historical materials will be easier for scholars, students and also for lay public.
