CLARIN Newsflash March 2020

Infrastructure in the Time of Corona

How does the Coronavirus influence the CLARIN infrastructure? The Board of Directors shares some thoughts.

Postponed events due to COVID-19

Among the many events that have been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic are the following:

• Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2020 | New date to be determined | Event page
• LREC2020 | New date to be determined | Event page
• LR4SSHOC: LREC2020 workshop | New date to be determined | Event page
• ParlaCLARIN II: LREC2020 workshop | New date to be determined | Event page
• REPROLANG: LREC2020 workshop | New date to be determined | Event page
• Helsinki Di­gital Hu­man­it­ies Hack­a­thon  | Postponed to autumn 2020 | Event page
• Workshop TwinTalks 2 at DHN 2020 | Postponed to 20 October 2020 | Event page

To learn about the various types of funding opportunities that are available for researchers, developers and educators through CLARIN, a funding page with an overview of all funding information is now available online.

We are delighted to announce that the keynote speakers for the 9th CLARIN Annual Conference (CLARIN2020) will be Professor Elena González-Blanco, (General Manager of Europe at CoverWallet) and Dr.Antske Fokkens  (Associate professor, Faculty of Humanities.Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).

The call for abstracts for CLARIN2020 is still open. You can submit your proposals until 14 April 2020.

We are very pleased to announce that Iceland joined CLARIN ERIC as a full member! 

Iceland has been involved with CLARIN for a number of years. In 2010 Iceland was a member of the consortium of the CLARIN Preparatory Phase project, but without any funding. In November 2018 Iceland joined CLARIN ERIC as an observer and as of this February Iceland participates as a full member.

In January and February ‘Tour de CLARIN’ visited the Phonogrammarchiv Knowledge Centre of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. 

The recent Tour de CLARIN posts include an introduction to the Phonogrammarchiv Knowledge Centre and an interview with Dr Beate Eder Jordan, a literary scholar focusing on minority and Roma literature at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. She has successfully collaborated with the Phonogrammarchiv Knowledge Centre in the RomArchive (2015–2019) project.

The European Summer University in Digital Humanities "Cultures & Technologies" (ESU) has launched a new website to mark the start of the next decade. 

The European Summer University in Digital Humanities 2020 will be held from 28 July to 7 August 2020 at Leipzig University. This year the ESU will be organized by the Forum for Digital Humanities Leipzig for the first time.

The CLARIN-LV conference: "Digital Latvian Language Resources and Tools in Common Research Infrastructure" raised awareness for CLARIN among Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) researchers in Latvia and shared information between stakeholders about recent achievements on language resources and tools. Krister Lindén (national coordinator FIN-CLARIN, University of Helsinki) and Kadri Vider (national coordinator CLARIN Estonia, CELR, University of Tartu) shared their experience in the construction and use of the CLARIN infrastructure while the Latvian researchers presented novel achievements in the development of digital language resources.

Since 1 May 2019, Cyprus has formally joined the CLARIN ERIC infrastructure, represented by the UNESCO Chair on Digital Cultural Heritage at the Cyprus University of Technology. After joining, CLARIN-CY organized the event ‘Copyright and related Rights in the Digital Single Market Directives’, to inform the participants of the new rules established. In December, a scientific meeting was held in Nicosia between the Israel Consortium for Digital Culture and Cypriot scientists to discuss possible cooperation between the cultural institutions and universities.

The H2020 cluster project SSHOC is organizing a survey, reaching out to all researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), to discover which vocabularies are the most commonly used in SSH research practices, define a methodology to map them, and investigate the potential for alignment with the SSHOC Reference Ontology.

This research will result in a detailed analysis, to be released by the end of 2020.

The deadline for contributions is 30 April 2020.

BLOGS

This month ‘Tour de CLARIN’ visits the CLARIN-UK consortium. The UK has been an observer of CLARIN since 2015 and is now almost half-way through its second three-year period. Countries are admitted as observers in order to prepare a proposal for full membership, to build a national consortium, and to develop infrastructure at the national level, and these are the tasks that are currently the focus for CLARIN in the UK. 

WATCH THIS!

This talk by Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson (Professor Emeritus in Icelandic Language and Linguistics at the University of Iceland) focuses on the threats that the digital revolution and the global dominance of English pose to small languages like Icelandic.

The recordings of the Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities and of the PARTHENOS CEE Workshop for CEE countries are now available on the VideoLectures.NET platform.

EVENTS & CALLS

Become a part of the European Language Grid (ELG). Boost your language technologies. Be among the first pioneers to test the platform. Take part in the open call for pilot projects.

ELG runs two open calls. The first call was opened on 1 March 2020, project proposals can be submitted until 30 April 2020. The second call will be opened in September 2020.

SMEs and research organisations are eligible for project funding. Proposed projects should last between 9 and 12 months and can be funded with a budget of up to €200,000. Projects should contribute resources, services, tools or datasets to the ELG to increase its coverage, or they should develop applications using language resources and technologies available in the ELG. 

Lancaster University is pleased to offer three free training events that cover the techniques of corpus linguistics and their application in three different areas.

• Corpus linguistics for the analysis of language, discourse and society
• Corpus linguistics for language learning, teaching and testing
• Statistics and data visualisation for corpus linguistics

The schools include both lectures and practical sessions that introduce the latest developments in the field and practical applications of cutting-edge analytical techniques. The summer schools are taught by leading experts in the field from Lancaster University.

The Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2020 will take place at Keble College from Monday 13 July to Friday 17 July. This annual Summer School offers training to anyone with an interest in the Digital Humanities, including academics at all career stages, students, project managers, and people who work in IT, libraries, and cultural heritage.

Participants follow one of nine parallel workshop strands throughout the week, supplementing their training with expert guest lectures.

The registration for ESSLLI 2020 is open.

The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is a yearly recurring event, which has been organized since 1989. An ESSLLI Summer School provides an interdisciplinary setting in which courses and workshops are offered in logic, linguistics and computer science.

In addition to the courses and workshops listed on the ESSLLI2020 website, the programme features a Student Session and evening lectures by invited speakers. The 25th Conference on Formal Grammar is also held in conjunction with ESSLLI on 8-9 August 2020.

Due to the coronavirus COVID-19, the LTDH2020 Steering Committee has extended the deadline for the submission of papers and abstracts to 15 May 2020 for the "Language Technologies and Digital Humanities” conference.

The conference aims to bring together researchers from various backgrounds and methodological frameworks.