From Tombstones to Corpora: TSML for Research on Language, Culture, Identity and Gender Differences

Tombstone inscriptions represent a linguistic genre which yields insights in culture and language. Creating corpora from tombstones is thus a complementary approach for the study of languages and cultures. For the annotation of tombstone corpora, we propose TSML, the Tombstone-Markup-Language, developed during the massive annotation of Taiwanese tombstones and a number of tombstones from China, Indonesia and Europe. We discuss our conceptual framework in the annotation of tombstones and derive successively and present preliminary research data to show how the usefulness of the annotations. Finally, we will encourage researchers to participate in the specification of TSML to obtain soon an annotation language for annotations across cultures and languages.