Old Norse Digital Web

An Integrated Environment for Old Icelandic Morphology and Textual Study

Professor Timothy Tangherlini (Scandinavian, UCLA), with the assistance of Aurelijus Vijunas (PhD, UCLA) and Kryztof Urban (PhD, UCLA), is developing an automated, web-based Old Icelandic morphological (“word form”) analyzer and English language search tool that will attach to Old Icelandic/Old Norse texts, both in diplomatic transcription (that is, texts transcribed exactly as they appear in the manuscript) and in normalized form (the text converted into standard spelling). Currently using the Fornaldar sögur (“Legendary Sagas”) as the test text platform, the project will eventually include the majority of Old Icelandic prose texts.

Work is underway recoding the early analyzer to a more efficient and easily debugged analyzer written in Haskell, and increasing the size of the lexical database by incorporating headwords and definitions from the standard English language dictionary of Old Icelandic (Cleasby-Vigfusson), as well as the headwords from the Old Icelandic dictionary, Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog (ONP). The disambiguation routines, orthographic normalization routines, and increased size of the word database will allow for more precise searches of an increasing body of digitized Old Icelandic texts. Ultimately, users will be able to study medieval Icelandic texts in a rich, meaningful way, all online.

Go to the IceMorph project at http://tango.bol.ucla.edu/andreas09/index.html.

A July 2014, PLOS One research article “Semi-Supervised Morphosyntactic Classification of Old Icelandic” details the specifics of IceMorph .

Professor Tangherlini’s project is funded by a National Science Foundation grant administered by CMRS with additional support from the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the UCLA Council on Research, and the UCLA Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.