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metadata
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 s ſ, 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

  • text comes from simple/ where available (text_source = "layout", 5,105 docs). For the 375 works only present in full/, it is reconstructed by space-joining the token layer (text_source = "tokens"), so line breaks and the original whitespace are lost there.
  • text_normalized is the full/ token layer with CAB replace corrections applied (multi-token corrections replace the whole span), space-joined. It is null for the 10 works only present in simple/.
  • 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_images and num_pages are 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).

license family docs docs % tokens tokens % license URLs
cc-by-sa-4.0 2,644 48.2% 139,433,878 68.2% http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.de/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.de
cc-by-nc-3.0 1,559 28.4% 20,418,259 10.0% http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/de
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/de/
cc-by-sa-3.0 623 11.4% 15,287,129 7.5% http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/
cc0-1.0 370 6.8% 16,938,595 8.3% http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
cc-by-4.0 215 3.9% 8,189,539 4.0% http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.de
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.de
cc-by-sa-2.0 51 0.9% 3,058,054 1.5% http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/
gutenberg 9 0.2% 344,316 0.2% https://web.archive.org/web/20180927123034/http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Project_Gutenberg_License
cc-by-3.0 3 0.1% 571,346 0.3% http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/de/
cc-by-nc-sa-4.0 2 0.0% 19,672 0.0% https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.de
mdz-copyright 1 0.0% 24,964 0.0% http://mdz.bib-bvb.de/copyright.htm
noc-nc-1.0 1 0.0% 125,859 0.1% http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-NC/1.0/
nug-kkn 1 0.0% 55,702 0.0% http://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/lizenzen/nug-kkn/
out-of-copyright-nc 1 0.0% 115,388 0.1% https://www.europeana.eu/portal/de/rights/out-of-copyright-non-commercial.html
total 5,480 100% 204,582,701 100%

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_normalized comes 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), whereas text keeps the original layout.
  • text is not uniform. 375 documents have their historical text reconstructed from the token layer and lack line breaks; check text_source if 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 year is parsed heuristically from the free-text date_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.