MHDBDB TEI Repository

TEI-encoded Middle High German literature texts with semantic annotations and dual web interfaces from the Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (MHDBDB), University of Salzburg.

Overview

Alle Inhalte basieren auf den Daten der Mittelhochdeutschen Begriffsdatenbank (MHDBDB) der Universität Salzburg – einem Forschungsprojekt mit über 50 Jahren mediävistischer Text- und Begriffsforschung.

Corpus Content

• TEI-encoded texts of Middle High German literature
• Authority files: persons, works, lexicon, concepts, genres, names, variants
• Pre-built indices for fast search
• Comprehensive test suite with Playwright integration

Two Web Interfaces

Feature	Main Site (index.html)	Playground (playground/)
Purpose	Public search & reading	Advanced research & analysis
Data	Pre-built indices	Pre-built authority index + lazy-loaded TEI
Search	Single lemma with filters	Multiple search types (incl. multi-lemma)
Target Users	General public, students	Researchers, medievalists

📚 Documentation

For Developers

• CLAUDE.md - Primary developer guide and project overview
• docs/INDEX.MD - Comprehensive knowledge base gateway with links to specialized documentation

For Users

• Playground includes built-in help and search examples
• Authority data browsing with filtering and sorting

Quick Start

Start Web Server

npm run serve
# Opens http://localhost:8080

Build Indices (Optional)

Pre-built indices are included. To rebuild:

npm run build              # Build all indices
npm run build:authority    # Build authority index only
npm run build:corpus       # Build corpus index only
npm run validate:indices   # Validate generated indices

Run Tests

npm test                   # Run all tests
npm run test:ui            # Interactive test UI
npm run test:headed        # Run with visible browser

Programmatic Access

TEI files reference authority data via xml:id:

<author ref="#person_445">Meister Eckhart</author>
<w lemma="vriunt" ana="#concept_12345">vriunt</w>

XPath Examples

//tei:persName[@type='preferred']  # All preferred person names
//tei:w[@lemma='vriunt']           # All instances of 'vriunt'

Authority Files

File	Content
persons.xml	Authors and historical persons
works.xml	Works and manuscript metadata
lexicon.xml	Lemmata with grammatical annotations
concepts.xml	Semantic concepts (taxonomy)
genres.xml	Literary genres (taxonomy)
names.xml	Proper names with semantic relations
variants.xml	Orthographic variants mapped to lemmas

Architecture

Pre-Built Indices

The repository includes pre-built compressed indices for fast loading:

Index	Contains
authority-index.json.gz	All authority files merged
corpus-index.json.gz	Texts with lemma positions

Features:

• Compressed JSON format for reduced download size
• IndexedDB caching with automatic expiration
• No XML parsing overhead in browser

Technology Stack

• Frontend: Vanilla JavaScript (ES Modules), Tailwind CSS
• Compression: Pako (gzip compression)
• Storage: Dexie.js (IndexedDB wrapper)
• Testing: Playwright
• Build: Python + lxml for index generation
• Server: http-server (npm) or Python http.server

Middle High German Normalization

All search functions use centralized MHG character normalization:

• Long vowels: â→a, ê→e, î→i, ô→o, û→u
• Umlauts: ä→ae, ö→oe, ü→ue
• Parity between Python (build) and JavaScript (runtime)
• Comprehensive automated test coverage

License & Contact

License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 AT Contact: [email protected] | https://mhdbdb.plus.ac.at Project: University of Salzburg, 50+ years of medievalist research