Multilingualism in Greater Poland court records (1386–1448): tagging discourse boundaries and code-switching

Abstract

This paper introduces the Electronic Repository of Greater Poland Oaths, eROThA (1386–1446), a digitisation project of a diplomatic edition of mediaeval land court oaths recorded in Latin and Old Polish, resulting in a small, lightly tagged specialised bilingual corpus. We present the background, aims, design and methodology of the project. We also discuss the problems and limitations entrenched in turning a printed diplomatic edition into a machine-readable diplomatic edition equipped with a new interpretative layer that is sensitive to the switches between Latin and Old Polish. In addition to the automatic annotation of code-switched items on the basis of typographic characteristics of the printed edition, flexible coding of recurrent language and discourse boundary phenomena has been introduced manually to account for linguistically ambiguous or neutral forms. The project offers a fully multilingual corpus, as well as customised Polish-only and Latin-only datasets, and enables filtered metadata searches in the online front-end. Overall, the report presents a methodology for constructing multilingual corpora in the context of legal cultures in medieval Central Europe that may be extrapolated to datasets originating in other periods and regions.

Multimodality in the Courtroom in American and British Criminal Cases

“…For example: In the courtroom, eye contact shows public distance, connection, and additional information. In a criminal trial that is being recorded on videotape and is being filmed in the courtroom there may be additional possible participants, the internet audience [16]. We've all noticed that viewers are more direct eye contact between the cameras and the visual participants, and less engaged if they're not.…”