We present AURIS, the Augsburg corpus for Reference and Information Structure, a multilingual corpus annotated for reference, discourse relations, and aspects of information structure. AURIS introduces an innovative use of off-the-shelf spreadsheet software for complex annotation tasks, reducing technical barriers and dependencies common in discourse annotation. Designed for classroom use, it enables linguistics and philology students to explore diverse theoretical frameworks while working in their language of choice. The paper focuses on technical design and workflows that integrate and generate pre-annotations from heterogeneous sources. Despite its low-tech approach, AURIS aligns with established standards and remains interoperable with existing projects. Preprocessing scripts support multiple languages, with an initial annotation round on German texts evaluated against TED-MDB and ParCorFull data converted into AURIS formats. This approach demonstrates that accessible tools can yield high-quality, replicable annotations for discourse and information-structure research.

We describe the creation of a cross-dialectal lexical resource for Low German, a regional language spoken primarily in Germany and the Netherlands, based on the application of Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) technologies. We argue that this approach is particularly well-suited for a language without a written standard, but with multiple, incompatible orthographies and considerable internal variation in phonology, spelling and grammar. A major hurdle in the preservation and documentation of and in the creation of educational materials (such as texts and dictionaries) for this variety is its internal degree of linguistic and orthographic variation, intensified by mutually exclusive influences from different national languages and their respective orthographies. We thus aim to provide a “digital Rosetta stone” to unify lexical materials from different dialects through linking dictionaries and mapping corresponding words without the need for a standardvariety. This involves two components, a mapping between different orthographies and phonological systems, and a technology for linking regional dictionaries maintained by different hosts and developed by or for different communities of speakers.