license:
- other
license_details: >-
Mixed. Every document carries its own license in the `license` and
`license_family` columns (CC BY-SA 4.0/3.0/2.0, CC BY-NC 3.0, CC0 1.0, CC BY
4.0/3.0, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, Project Gutenberg license, and a few
library-specific rights statements). Filter by `license_family` before reuse.
language:
- de
- la
- gml
language_details: >-
deu, lat, gml (Middle Low German); Early New High German and New High German
texts, tagged as deu
multilinguality:
- monolingual
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
pretty_name: Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA) Documents
source_datasets:
- original
annotations_creators:
- expert-generated
language_creators:
- found
tags:
- historical
- historical-german
- early-new-high-german
- german
- dta
- deutsches-textarchiv
- tei
- tcf
- fraktur
- ocr
- orthographic-normalization
- spelling-normalization
- cab
- digital-humanities
- 15th-century
- 16th-century
- 17th-century
- 18th-century
- 19th-century
- 20th-century
configs:
- config_name: documents
default: true
data_files:
- split: train
path: train-*.parquet
dataset_info:
config_name: documents
features:
- name: id
dtype: string
- name: dta_id
dtype: string
- name: urn
dtype: string
- name: url
dtype: string
- name: title
dtype: string
- name: subtitle
dtype: string
- name: volume
dtype: string
- name: part
dtype: string
- name: authors
list:
- name: surname
dtype: string
- name: forename
dtype: string
- name: gnd
dtype: string
- name: date_published
dtype: string
- name: year
dtype: int64
- name: place_of_publication
dtype: string
- name: publisher
dtype: string
- name: edition
dtype: string
- name: num_pages
dtype: int64
- name: repository
dtype: string
- name: shelfmark
dtype: string
- name: typeface
dtype: string
- name: bibl
dtype: string
- name: genre_dtamain
dtype: string
- name: genre_dtasub
dtype: string
- name: genre_dwds1main
dtype: string
- name: genre_dwds1sub
dtype: string
- name: dta_corpus_labels
list: string
- name: language
dtype: string
- name: language_note
dtype: string
- name: license
dtype: string
- name: license_family
dtype: string
- name: num_images
dtype: int64
- name: num_tokens
dtype: int64
- name: num_types
dtype: int64
- name: num_characters
dtype: int64
- name: num_sentences
dtype: int64
- name: text
dtype: string
- name: text_source
dtype: string
- name: text_normalized
dtype: string
splits:
- name: train
num_examples: 5480
Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA) Documents
This datasets hosts all documents from the Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA).
One row per work of the Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA), built from the
official DTA dump dta_komplett_2026-02-10 (TCF format). The dataset contains 5,480 documents spanning
1472 to 1987 with about 205M tokens and 1.4B characters of German text, with two text views per document:
text: the historical, layout-faithful transcription (line breaks, long sſ, combining diacritics, original spelling);text_normalized: the same text in modern orthography, produced by applying the DTA CAB orthography corrections (operation="replace") to the token layer.
Rich bibliographic metadata comes directly from the embedded TEI header: authors with GND identifiers, original
publication date and place, publisher, holding library and shelfmark, typeface, four genre schemes, DTA subcorpus
labels and the per-work license. Licenses vary across the corpus, so please check the license_family column
before reuse (see Licensing).
Dataset structure
Configs and splits
| Config | Split | Rows | Files |
|---|---|---|---|
documents (default) |
train |
5,480 | documents/train-0000[0-5].parquet (6 shards, zstd-compressed Parquet) |
There is only one split, because the dataset is a corpus and not a benchmark.
Loading
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("histde/dta-documents", "documents", split="train")
print(ds[0]["title"], ds[0]["year"])
# Only permissively licensed works, as a streaming iterator
permissive = load_dataset("histde/dta-documents", "documents", split="train", streaming=True)
permissive = permissive.filter(lambda d: d["license_family"] in {"cc0-1.0", "cc-by-4.0", "cc-by-3.0"})
With Polars, straight from the Parquet shards:
import polars as pl
df = pl.read_parquet("hf://datasets/histde/dta-documents/documents/train-*.parquet")
df.filter(pl.col("year") < 1700).select("id", "title", "license_family", "num_tokens")
Schema
| Column | Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
id |
string |
DTA directory name, used as the primary document identifier (DTADirName). Falls back to the TCF file name |
goethe_faust01_1808 |
dta_id |
string |
Numeric DTA identifier (DTAID) |
200006 |
urn |
string |
Persistent URN of the work | urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4-200006-1 |
url |
string |
Landing page of the work at deutschestextarchiv.de | https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/343016 |
title |
string |
Main title(s) from the TEI title statement. Multiple main titles are joined with \n |
Iphigenie auf Tauris |
subtitle |
string |
Subtitle(s), joined with \n. Null if absent |
Ein Schauspiel |
volume |
string |
Volume title (text of <title type="volume">). Null if absent |
Dritter Theil |
part |
string |
Part title (text of <title type="part">). Null if absent |
Die sentimentalischen Dichter |
authors |
list<struct> |
Authors as {surname, forename, gnd} structs. gnd is the GND/PND URI, may be null. Empty list for anonymous works |
[{"surname": "Reideburg", "forename": "Christoph von", "gnd": "http://d-nb.info/gnd/128862580"}] |
date_published |
string |
Raw publication date string of the original print, as given in the header | 1642 |
year |
int64 |
First four-digit number parsed from date_published. Null if none found |
1642 |
place_of_publication |
string |
Place of publication of the original print | Breslau |
publisher |
string |
Publisher name(s), joined with \n |
Georgius Baumann |
edition |
string |
Edition statement (text, or the n attribute if the element has no text) |
2. Auflage |
num_pages |
int64 |
Page count of the original source (measure type="pages") |
72 |
repository |
string |
Holding library of the digitized copy | Universitätsbibliothek Breslau |
shelfmark |
string |
Shelfmark of the copy at the repository | Universitätsbibliothek Breslau, 4 A 277/11 / 343016 |
typeface |
string |
Typeface of the original print | Fraktur |
bibl |
string |
Short bibliographic citation string | Reideburg, Christoph von: Kurtze Anleitung: Wie die jetzige böse Zeit/ ... Breslau, 1642. |
genre_dtamain |
string |
Main genre, DTA scheme | Gebrauchsliteratur |
genre_dtasub |
string |
Sub genre, DTA scheme | Leichenpredigt |
genre_dwds1main |
string |
Main genre, DWDS scheme | Belletristik |
genre_dwds1sub |
string |
Sub genre, DWDS scheme | Prosa |
dta_corpus_labels |
list<string> |
DTA (sub)corpus membership labels (DTACorpus class codes) |
["ready", "core"] |
language |
string |
ISO 639-3 code of the primary language | deu |
language_note |
string |
Human-readable language label from the header | (Früh-)Neuhochdeutsch |
license |
string |
Per-work license URL exactly as given in the header. Varies across the corpus | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/ |
license_family |
string |
Normalized license identifier derived from license (http/https, /de/, deed variants collapsed) |
cc-by-sa-3.0 |
num_images |
int64 |
Number of page images (DTA extent measure) | 72 |
num_tokens |
int64 |
Number of tokens (DTA extent measure) | 11515 |
num_types |
int64 |
Number of word types (DTA extent measure) | 3440 |
num_characters |
int64 |
Number of characters (DTA extent measure) | 78795 |
num_sentences |
int64 |
Sentence count from the full/ sentence layer. Null if the work has no full/ file |
842 |
text |
string |
Historical transcription. Layout-faithful <text> layer from simple/ (line breaks, long s ſ, combining diacritics), or space-joined tokens if only full/ exists |
Kurtze Anleitung:\nWie die jetzige boͤſe Zeit/ darinnen zwar fuͤr ſich ſelbſt/ ... |
text_source |
string |
Origin of text: layout (from simple/) or tokens (reconstructed from the full/ token layer) |
layout |
text_normalized |
string |
Modern orthography: full/ token layer with CAB replace corrections applied, space-joined. Null if the work has no full/ file |
Kurze Anleitung : Wie die jetzige böse Zeit / darinnen zwar für sich selbst / ... |
Example row
{
"id": "343016",
"dta_id": "200006",
"urn": "urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4-200006-1",
"url": "https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/343016",
"title": "Kurtze Anleitung: Wie die jetzige böse Zeit/ darinnen zwar für sich selbst/ nichts/ alß eytel Klag/ Ach/ vnd Weh regieret",
"authors": [{"surname": "Reideburg", "forename": "Christoph von", "gnd": "http://d-nb.info/gnd/128862580"}],
"date_published": "1642",
"year": 1642,
"place_of_publication": "Breslau",
"publisher": "Georgius Baumann",
"repository": "Universitätsbibliothek Breslau",
"typeface": "Fraktur",
"genre_dtamain": "Gebrauchsliteratur",
"genre_dtasub": "Leichenpredigt",
"dta_corpus_labels": ["ready", "aedit"],
"language": "deu",
"language_note": "(Früh-)Neuhochdeutsch",
"license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/",
"license_family": "cc-by-sa-3.0",
"num_tokens": 11515,
"num_sentences": 842,
"text": "Kurtze Anleitung:\nWie die jetzige boͤſe Zeit/ darinnen zwar fuͤr ſich ſelbſt/\nnichts/ alß eytel Klag/ Ach/ vnd Weh regieret; ...",
"text_source": "layout",
"text_normalized": "Kurze Anleitung : Wie die jetzige böse Zeit / darinnen zwar für sich selbst / nichts / als eitel Klage / Ach / und Weh regieret ; ..."
}
Dataset creation
Source data
The DTA is a reference corpus of printed German from the late 15th to the early 20th century, curated by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW). Texts were transcribed by double keying from first editions wherever possible, and are published with TEI headers, sentence and token layers and orthographic normalization from the CAB tool chain.
This dataset was built from the complete TCF dump dta_komplett_2026-02-10, which comes in two variants:
simple/(5,107 files): CMDI metadata and the layout-faithful historical text (<text>layer);full/(5,471 files): CMDI metadata and the annotation layers (tokens, sentences, orthography).
The union of both variants gives 5,481 works. One work (ford_pitty_1633) is excluded because its TCF file is
not well-formed XML.
Processing
textcomes fromsimple/where available (text_source = "layout", 5,105 docs). For the 375 works only present infull/, it is reconstructed by space-joining the token layer (text_source = "tokens"), so line breaks and the original whitespace are lost there.text_normalizedis thefull/token layer with CABreplacecorrections applied (multi-token corrections replace the whole span), space-joined. It is null for the 10 works only present insimple/.- Metadata is deliberately kept un-flattened: authors are a list of structs, all four genre schemes are
separate columns, the raw license URL is kept next to a normalized
license_family. num_tokens,num_types,num_characters,num_imagesandnum_pagesare the extent measures from the DTA header, not recomputed values.
The conversion script and the statistics script are available in the dta-experiments repository.
Statistics
All tables below were produced with dta_dataset_stats.py from the released Parquet shards.
Overview
| statistic | value |
|---|---|
| Documents | 5,480 |
| Documents with normalized text (full/ layer) | 5,470 (99.8%) |
| Documents with at least one author | 3,104 (56.6%) |
| Distinct authors (by GND id) | 1,317 |
| Year range | 1472-1987 (1 unknown) |
| Median year | 1836 |
| Tokens (header measure) | 204,582,701 |
| Types (header measure) | 33,741,287 |
| Characters (header measure) | 1,423,995,435 |
Characters in text column |
1,380,752,264 |
Characters in text_normalized column |
1,370,639,606 |
| Sentences (full/ layer) | 10,376,423 |
| Page images | 761,995 |
| Median tokens per document | 10,394 |
| Median pages (images) per document | 16 |
Temporal distribution (50-year bins)
| period | docs | sentences | tokens | characters | token share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1450–1499 | 15 | 1,899 | 177,258 | 997,389 | 0.1% |
| 1500–1549 | 17 | 10,469 | 308,471 | 1,915,965 | 0.2% |
| 1550–1599 | 98 | 139,035 | 3,572,336 | 23,618,803 | 1.7% |
| 1600–1649 | 422 | 433,762 | 9,757,100 | 66,033,889 | 4.8% |
| 1650–1699 | 691 | 1,118,361 | 23,338,594 | 159,938,400 | 11.4% |
| 1700–1749 | 435 | 1,143,293 | 24,779,141 | 171,116,209 | 12.1% |
| 1750–1799 | 583 | 1,566,582 | 30,933,941 | 214,031,382 | 15.1% |
| 1800–1849 | 1,618 | 2,000,919 | 40,798,688 | 284,536,219 | 19.9% |
| 1850–1899 | 1,143 | 3,086,868 | 55,792,116 | 393,248,560 | 27.3% |
| 1900–1949 | 444 | 737,908 | 13,114,628 | 95,203,044 | 6.4% |
| 1950–1999 | 13 | 137,150 | 2,005,488 | 13,321,270 | 1.0% |
| unknown | 1 | 177 | 4,940 | 34,305 | 0.0% |
| total | 5,480 | 10,376,423 | 204,582,701 | 1,423,995,435 | 100% |
Text source
| text_source | docs | docs % | tokens | tokens % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
layout |
5,105 | 93.2% | 185,164,389 | 90.5% |
tokens |
375 | 6.8% | 19,418,312 | 9.5% |
Language
| language | docs | docs % | tokens | tokens % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
deu |
5,477 | 99.9% | 204,523,746 | 100.0% |
lat |
2 | 0.0% | 56,714 | 0.0% |
gml |
1 | 0.0% | 2,241 | 0.0% |
Genre (DWDS main)
| genre_dwds1main | docs | docs % | tokens | tokens % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zeitung | 2,036 | 37.2% | 17,152,284 | 8.4% |
| Gebrauchsliteratur | 1,718 | 31.4% | 58,283,320 | 28.5% |
| Wissenschaft | 953 | 17.4% | 87,148,247 | 42.6% |
| Belletristik | 773 | 14.1% | 41,998,850 | 20.5% |
Genre (DWDS sub, top 10)
| genre_dwds1sub | docs | docs % | tokens | tokens % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| unknown | 2,036 | 37.2% | 17,152,284 | 8.4% |
| Leichenpredigt | 336 | 6.1% | 3,517,225 | 1.7% |
| Zeitschrift | 217 | 4.0% | 1,697,733 | 0.8% |
| Theologie | 214 | 3.9% | 10,486,746 | 5.1% |
| Brief | 204 | 3.7% | 84,325 | 0.0% |
| Roman | 198 | 3.6% | 13,211,036 | 6.5% |
| Gesellschaft | 165 | 3.0% | 3,852,413 | 1.9% |
| Novelle | 126 | 2.3% | 3,031,211 | 1.5% |
| Lyrik | 125 | 2.3% | 5,090,960 | 2.5% |
| Gelegenheitsschrift:Tod | 116 | 2.1% | 103,280 | 0.1% |
| other (123 values) | 1,743 | 31.8% | 146,355,488 | 71.5% |
Genre (DTA main)
| genre_dtamain | docs | docs % | tokens | tokens % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| unknown | 3,468 | 63.3% | 69,372,311 | 33.9% |
| Fachtext | 743 | 13.6% | 78,106,238 | 38.2% |
| Belletristik | 561 | 10.2% | 33,626,235 | 16.4% |
| Gebrauchsliteratur | 536 | 9.8% | 22,981,508 | 11.2% |
| Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen in Form gedruckter Briefe | 50 | 0.9% | 89,564 | 0.0% |
| Abhandlungen in Zeitschriften, Sammelbänden etc. | 36 | 0.7% | 145,342 | 0.1% |
| Ankündigungen, Berichtigungen und kurze Nachrichten | 29 | 0.5% | 25,687 | 0.0% |
| Berliner Akademiereden/-schriften und andere Reden | 17 | 0.3% | 71,027 | 0.0% |
| Rezensionen | 7 | 0.1% | 8,514 | 0.0% |
| Pariser Akademiereden/-schriften | 6 | 0.1% | 16,728 | 0.0% |
| Vorworte und andere Beiträge Humboldts in Schriften anderer Autoren, Lexikonartikel | 6 | 0.1% | 20,581 | 0.0% |
| Gelegenheitsschrift | 5 | 0.1% | 49,906 | 0.0% |
| Journalismus | 5 | 0.1% | 54,829 | 0.0% |
| Albumblätter | 3 | 0.1% | 812 | 0.0% |
| Gutachten | 3 | 0.1% | 6,339 | 0.0% |
| Sonderdrucke und andere Grenzfälle zu selbständig erschienenen Schriften | 2 | 0.0% | 3,358 | 0.0% |
| Wissenschaft | 2 | 0.0% | 3,124 | 0.0% |
| Sachliteratur | 1 | 0.0% | 598 | 0.0% |
Genre (DTA sub, top 10)
| genre_dtasub | docs | docs % | tokens | tokens % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| unknown | 3,628 | 66.2% | 69,896,619 | 34.2% |
| Leichenpredigt | 334 | 6.1% | 3,495,630 | 1.7% |
| Roman | 163 | 3.0% | 11,534,905 | 5.6% |
| Prosa | 128 | 2.3% | 10,291,868 | 5.0% |
| Lyrik | 114 | 2.1% | 4,731,157 | 2.3% |
| Drama | 82 | 1.5% | 2,330,599 | 1.1% |
| Recht | 79 | 1.4% | 9,743,726 | 4.8% |
| Philosophie | 76 | 1.4% | 5,426,303 | 2.7% |
| Historiographie | 46 | 0.8% | 7,221,703 | 3.5% |
| Medizin | 46 | 0.8% | 6,013,804 | 2.9% |
| other (86 values) | 784 | 14.3% | 73,896,387 | 36.1% |
Typeface
| typeface | docs | docs % | tokens | tokens % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fraktur | 4,478 | 81.7% | 164,623,059 | 80.5% |
| Antiqua | 427 | 7.8% | 35,856,371 | 17.5% |
| Schwabacher | 338 | 6.2% | 724,934 | 0.4% |
| Handschrift | 218 | 4.0% | 1,315,690 | 0.6% |
| Jean-Paul-Fraktur | 9 | 0.2% | 1,409,611 | 0.7% |
| Current | 2 | 0.0% | 1,963 | 0.0% |
| Rotunda | 2 | 0.0% | 313,225 | 0.2% |
| Antiqua (Schreibmaschine) | 1 | 0.0% | 34,176 | 0.0% |
| Antiqua, Kursive | 1 | 0.0% | 18,883 | 0.0% |
| Antqiua | 1 | 0.0% | 3,527 | 0.0% |
| Frakur | 1 | 0.0% | 10,103 | 0.0% |
| Textur | 1 | 0.0% | 270,599 | 0.1% |
| unknown | 1 | 0.0% | 560 | 0.0% |
Values are taken verbatim from the headers, including the two typos (Antqiua, Frakur).
DTA corpus labels (a document can carry several)
| label | docs | docs % | tokens | tokens % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ready |
5,480 | 100.0% | 204,582,701 | 100.0% |
core |
1,478 | 27.0% | 130,114,948 | 63.6% |
china |
1,149 | 21.0% | 111,416,242 | 54.5% |
mkhz1 |
625 | 11.4% | 3,996,672 | 2.0% |
nrhz |
530 | 9.7% | 4,290,483 | 2.1% |
aedit |
335 | 6.1% | 3,508,098 | 1.7% |
mts |
320 | 5.8% | 18,006,989 | 8.8% |
lefevre |
319 | 5.8% | 476,390 | 0.2% |
dtae |
244 | 4.5% | 21,475,420 | 10.5% |
mkhz2 |
222 | 4.1% | 2,169,371 | 1.1% |
correspondent |
204 | 3.7% | 925,755 | 0.5% |
tevo |
202 | 3.7% | 5,682,395 | 2.8% |
sanders-briefe |
190 | 3.5% | 61,890 | 0.0% |
hab |
184 | 3.4% | 10,256,959 | 5.0% |
augsburgerallgemeine |
181 | 3.3% | 2,761,778 | 1.3% |
avh |
172 | 3.1% | 443,668 | 0.2% |
wikisource |
169 | 3.1% | 5,787,543 | 2.8% |
sbb_funeralschriften |
112 | 2.0% | 77,981 | 0.0% |
tdef |
109 | 2.0% | 940,772 | 0.5% |
novellenschatz |
87 | 1.6% | 1,643,336 | 0.8% |
blumenbach |
33 | 0.6% | 2,688,412 | 1.3% |
epoetics |
23 | 0.4% | 3,074,730 | 1.5% |
frauenstudium |
22 | 0.4% | 134,198 | 0.1% |
psyleko |
19 | 0.3% | 2,075,500 | 1.0% |
ntsm |
11 | 0.2% | 32,139 | 0.0% |
avhkv |
9 | 0.2% | 636,539 | 0.3% |
briefjeanpaul |
9 | 0.2% | 1,409,611 | 0.7% |
gutenberg_org |
8 | 0.1% | 325,940 | 0.2% |
gutzkow |
7 | 0.1% | 478,246 | 0.2% |
dwds1 |
5 | 0.1% | 465,688 | 0.2% |
gei |
2 | 0.0% | 57,474 | 0.0% |
gutenberg_de |
2 | 0.0% | 116,184 | 0.1% |
gwb |
2 | 0.0% | 80,666 | 0.0% |
urmel |
2 | 0.0% | 1,068 | 0.0% |
zbk |
2 | 0.0% | 48,127 | 0.0% |
greflinger |
1 | 0.0% | 9,079 | 0.0% |
grenzboten |
1 | 0.0% | 116,208 | 0.1% |
The core label marks the curated DTA core corpus (1,478 works, 63.6% of all tokens), which is the
balanced selection by genre and period. The other labels denote extension corpora (DTAE) contributed by
partner projects.
Place of publication (top 10)
| place | docs | docs % | tokens | tokens % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin | 604 | 11.0% | 30,616,946 | 15.0% |
| Köln | 532 | 9.7% | 4,682,997 | 2.3% |
| Leipzig | 425 | 7.8% | 41,950,384 | 20.5% |
| Hamburg | 330 | 6.0% | 5,514,413 | 2.7% |
| Augsburg | 256 | 4.7% | 4,581,351 | 2.2% |
| Altstrelitz | 172 | 3.1% | 57,702 | 0.0% |
| unknown | 160 | 2.9% | 980,933 | 0.5% |
| München | 153 | 2.8% | 3,434,662 | 1.7% |
| Frankfurt (Main) | 141 | 2.6% | 11,430,873 | 5.6% |
| Königsberg | 133 | 2.4% | 926,843 | 0.5% |
| other (246 values) | 2,574 | 47.0% | 100,405,597 | 49.1% |
Most frequent authors (top 10)
| author | GND | docs | tokens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Humboldt, Alexander von | http://d-nb.info/gnd/118554700 | 183 | 1,504,828 |
| Sanders, Daniel | http://d-nb.info/gnd/119242044 | 173 | 69,412 |
| Dach, Simon | http://d-nb.info/gnd/11852321X | 112 | 77,981 |
| N. N. | 51 | 1,882,041 | |
| Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich | http://d-nb.info/gnd/116208503 | 35 | 2,814,553 |
| Sattler, Basilius | http://d-nb.info/gnd/116974788 | 26 | 352,365 |
| Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von | http://d-nb.info/gnd/118540238 | 24 | 1,064,748 |
| Herder, Johann Gottfried von | http://d-nb.info/gnd/118549553 | 23 | 690,276 |
| Grimm, Jacob | http://d-nb.info/gnd/118542257 | 17 | 2,441,309 |
| Fontane, Theodor | http://d-nb.info/gnd/118534262 | 16 | 1,262,140 |
Licensing
The DTA publishes every work under its own license, and this dataset keeps that information per row in the
license (raw URL from the header) and license_family (normalized) columns. There is no single license
for the whole dataset. Note that only cc0-1.0 is a public domain dedication; all cc-by-* licenses carry
binding conditions (attribution, share-alike, or non-commercial use), and about 28% of the documents are
restricted to non-commercial use (cc-by-nc-3.0, cc-by-nc-sa-4.0, noc-nc-1.0, out-of-copyright-nc).
To select a subset that fits your use case:
ds_sa = ds.filter(lambda d: d["license_family"] in {"cc0-1.0", "cc-by-4.0", "cc-by-3.0", "cc-by-sa-4.0", "cc-by-sa-3.0", "cc-by-sa-2.0"})
Considerations for using the data
- Coverage is uneven. Roughly 60% of the tokens date from 1750 to 1899; the 15th and 16th centuries are
thinly covered. Newspapers (
Zeitung) dominate the document count but make up only 8% of the tokens, and a single project (Alexander von Humboldt's writings) contributes 183 short documents. - Historical content. The texts reflect the views, language and stereotypes of their time, including religious, political and colonial-era writing. They are provided for research on historical German and should not be taken as statements of fact or acceptable opinion.
- Normalization is automatic.
text_normalizedcomes from the CAB tool chain and is not manually corrected. Expect residual errors, especially for very early texts, Latin passages, and proper names. The normalized text is also whitespace-tokenized (punctuation is separated by spaces), whereastextkeeps the original layout. textis not uniform. 375 documents have their historical text reconstructed from the token layer and lack line breaks; checktext_sourceif layout matters to you.- Metadata quirks. Genre fields are null for a large share of the works in the DTA scheme (use the DWDS
scheme for complete main-genre coverage), typeface strings contain a few typos, and
yearis parsed heuristically from the free-textdate_published.
Citation
Please cite the DTA when using this dataset:
@misc{dta2026,
author = {{Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften}},
title = {Deutsches Textarchiv. Grundlage für ein Referenzkorpus der neuhochdeutschen Sprache},
year = {2026},
address = {Berlin},
howpublished = {Herausgegeben von der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften},
url = {https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/}
}
Acknowledgements
A big thank you to the whole team of the Deutsches Textarchiv at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities! Also many thanks to all the partner projects, libraries and archives that contributed texts to the DTA extension corpora.
This dataset only converts an official dump into Parquet for convenient use with the Hugging Face ecosystem.
AI disclosure
This dataset card was drafted with Claude Fable 5 (claude-fable-5) based on the statistics produced by
dta_dataset_stats.py, and reviewed by the dataset author. The conversion and statistics scripts carry their
own AI disclosure blocks, following the rules in the ai-disclosure repository.