Max Kade Center for German-American Studies

Please see the Max Kade Center website for information on research projects affiliated with the Center.

Digital Humanities

Germanic digital research collection (KU ScholarWorks)

Germanic Studies faculty support KU's faculty-driven Open-Access Policy by depositing versions of their published research articles, where they have been able to retain sufficient rights to do so, in the KU ScholarWorks digital repository. The international open access movement aims to make peer-reviewed research available freely to the scholarly community and the public. The Germanic collection includes both faculty publications as well as a growing retrospective collection of its theses and dissertations, the oldest dating to 1887, a senior thesis by Cora Kimball on The Niebelungenlied.

The Kansas Developmental Learner Corpus

This project set out to collect, annotate, and analyze a longitudinal corpus of university students’ writing in German as a Foreign Language at low proficiency levels. It contributes to Second Language Acquisition research by facilitating analyses of longitudinal language development both in groups and individuals. This project was supported by a Seed Grant from the KU Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities.

Linguistic Atlas of Kansas German Dialects

 Housed at the Max Kade Center and directed by Professor William Keel, this project fosters research on the German dialects of Kansas in the LAKGD, including maps, contemporary recordings, and historical materials.

Humboldt Digital Library

 In collaboration with Hochschule Offenburg, PI Emeritus Professor Frank Baron maintains a growing and dynamic digital database devoted to the travels and discoveries of Alexander von Humboldt. The HDL reflects Humboldt's holistic interest in the natural world: “The principal impulse by which I was directed was the earnest endeavor to comprehend the phenomena of physical objects in their general connection and to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces." – Alexander von Humboldt, preface,  Cosmos.