Digitized Occitan corpus of ancient and modern texts – CONTAM

The CONTAM project aims to establish a digital corpus of Occitan texts that is as exhaustive as possible, from the 16th century to the period preceding the “second Occitan renaissance” of the 19th century, in order to establish continuity between the medieval period, for which texts already digitized and partially exploitable exist, and the contemporary period covered by the BaTelÒC textual database (CLLE, UMR 5263), and thus fill the glaring lack of exploitable resources using current digital tools. The constitution of the corpus, the first stage of the project, is a prerequisite for the annotation and lemmatization of all the texts collected and encoded in TEI. Although rich in literary and pragmatic written production dating back thousands of years and recognized as a “rare discipline”, the Occitan language remains one of Europe's most under-resourced languages in terms of scientific tools for studying lexis, grammar and syntax, particularly for the period covered by this new corpus. The creation of CONTAM will represent a major step forward in safeguarding and promoting the Occitan linguistic heritage. In a field where contact between projects, data exchange and the interoperability of different modules must be encouraged, the CONTAM project aims to interconnect existing digital resources for Occitan, including BaTeLÒc for contemporary uses of Occitan, and THESOC for the diatopic study of lexical variation. This will make it possible to assess the continuity of the lexicon, syntax and morphology of Occitan from the Middle Ages to the present day, from a diachronic and diatopic point of view.