The project „Multilingual Database“, in which EXMARaLDA development started in 2000, was initiated by Jochen Rehbein. Between 2000 and 2005, one research assistant position (Thomas Schmidt) was financed through matching funds of the University of Hamburg for the Special Research Centre on Multilingualism (SFB 538), which in turn was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Between 2003 and 2005, the „Qualitätsoffensive der Stadt Hamburg“ financed a second research assistant position for the project (Kai Wörner).
Between 2005 and 2011, EXMARaLDA was developed in the project „Methods for the computer assisted creation and analysis of multilingual data“, now a regular project of the Special Research Centre on Multilingualism, funded by the DFG, with two research assistant positions (Thomas Schmidt and Kai Wörner). Jochen Rehbein headed the project from 2005 to 2008, Thomas Schmidt took over as principal investigator from 2008 to 2011. Between September 2005 and August 2006, Thomas Schmidt’s position was temporarily represented by Tülay Selcuk and Jasmin Bennöhr. Since 2006, Timm Lehmberg has supported the project team in EXMARaLDA development and support via positions in the projects „Sprachvariation in Norddeutschland (SiN)“ and „Sustainability of Linguistic Resources (C2)“, both financed through the DFG. Peter M. Fischer was part of the project team between July 2007 and July 2008 as a part-time substitute for Thomas Schmidt. In the last years of the project, substantial contributions to the development of EXMARaLDA were also made by Hanna Hedeland financed through residual funds of the DFG .
After the end of the maximal funding period of the SFB538, EXMARaLDA development was partly continued by the team of the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) with Kristin Bührig as the director, consisting of Thomas Schmidt (managing director until Nov 2011), Kai Wörner (managing director until 2013), Timm Lehmberg (managing director until 2014), Hanna Hedeland (managing director until 2019), Daniel Stein, Daniel Jettka, Anne Ferger, Fideniz Ercan, Yael Dilger, and Tomi Pirinen. Funds for one research assistant position came from the University of Hamburg (as a matching fund for CLARIN-D), the other positions were financed through two grants from the DFG-LiS program (principal investigator: Kai Wörner) and through CLARIN-D (BMBF, principal investigator: Kristin Bührig). As part of CLARIN-D and CLARIAH-DE (dito), Carolin Frontzeck and Heidemarie Sambale took over the task of managing the CLARIN-D Helpdesk which was used until 2020 to administer larger parts of EXMARaLDA support requests.
A fair number of student assistants have helped with EXMARaLDA development, documentation, training and support. At least, Sören Ohlhus, Hanna Hedeland, Secil Yusun, Tara al-Jaf, Yael Dilger, Celeste Machado, Fideniz Ercan, and Karolina Kaminska, all financed through the University of Hamburg or the above-mentioned third-party funds, deserve a special mention here.
The tools FOLKER and OrthoNormal were initially developed by Thomas Schmidt between 2008 and 2011 as a work commissioned by the project „Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK)“ (then headed by Arnulf Deppermann and Martin Hartung) at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim. From 2012, and until August 2021, Thomas Schmidt continued EXMARaLDA development, maintenance and support (now including FOLKER and OrthoNormal) in his new role as head of the program area „Oral Corpora“ at the IDS, supported by Wilfried Schütte, Jenny Winterscheid, Jan Gorisch and Evi Schedl. Financing in this time came through the IDS for the projects FOLK and “Corpus technology for oral corpora”.
From September 2021 to August 2022, basic EXMARaLDA support and maintenance tasks were carried out by Thomas Schmidt in his role as director of the RISE team at the University of Basel.
Since August 2021, there has been no dedicated financing for EXMARaLDA from academic institutions or third-party funding agencies. Until further notice, EXMARaLDA development, maintenance and support is provided by linguisticbits.de, a business unit of MusicalBits GmbH.
The SVG panel component of the Partitur-Editor was developed by Julia Damerow from „A Place Called Up Consulting, LLC“. This was financed through a DFG grant for the project „Sprechen – Schreiben – Visualisieren (MoDiKo)“. The Multimodal panel component of the Partitur-Editor was developed by Thomas Schmidt as contract work, financed by the University of Duisburg-Essen (Jens Lanwer).
EXMARaLDA has very much profited from the development of the ELAN software at the Max-Planck-Institute in Nijmegen (especially the various media players) and from Han Sloetje’s kind and valuable advice and support in many matters of software development. Likewise, several developments from the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals (BAS, Chritsoph Draxler and Florian Schiel) in Munich — the BAS audio player as well as MAUS and other web services — have greatly benefited the development of EXMARaLDA.
Andreas Nolda (formerly University of Szeged, now BBAW Berlin) has developed the DULKO extensions for the Partitur-Editor and helped to integrate them into the regular EXMARaLDA distribution.
The TT4J TreeTagger wrapper for Java, which EXMARaLDA uses for integrating the TreeTagger is developed by Richard Eckart de Castilho (TU Darmstadt). The Subtitles Library used for importing VTT and SRT files is developed by Cyrille Lebeaupin. Bernhard Fisseni (now University of Duisburg-Essen) has developed the TEI-Licht web services in the CLARIN-D/CLARIAH-DE projects at the IDS in Mannheim.