Nerthus Project

Universidad de La Rioja

The Nerthus Project aims at compiling a lexicon of Old English based on structural-functional principles. This involves the synthesis of the knowledge generated by a long tradition of philological studies in Old English and its reinterpretation not only in the light of new evidence but also by means of up-to-date linguistic concepts and methods.

The Nerthus Project applies the advances of Digital Humanities to the analysis, storage and dissemination of linguistic heritage as represented by Old English. With the focus on the relations of data, which are arranged in hierarchies and ontologies, meaningful digital resources and tools match the research in semantic universals and poles as well as meaning construction.

The Nerthus Project contributes to the development of the next generation of the Internet, which is, among other things, geared to the compilation of lexical databases and the 3D representation of web contents. The implementation in three dimensions of a database in which language itself is the object of analysis has direct implications for the semantic description of 3D environments

The Nerthus Project makes its main findings available online as open access databases and documents, thus taking part in the extension of the Web of data. By means of links to other projects of the discipline, the project disseminates meaningful structured information on the language of the Anglo-Saxons.