CLARIN Newsflash December 2021

Holiday Greetings
2021 – what a year it has been!

The pandemic continues to make real-life interaction difficult, yet we have successfully connected virtually through various workshops, CLARIN Cafés, and – of course – the Annual Conference (CLARIN2021). Our community has grown thanks to one new member and several new K-centres. 

On this year’s holiday card, we proudly present the CLARIN highlights of 2021. Visit the web page to view the card and browse through the links on the different items. 

Next year, CLARIN celebrates its 10th anniversary, and we are excited to see what 2022 will bring.

End of a Decade

The end of February 2022 marks an important milestone for CLARIN ERIC: it will have formally existed for ten years.

And what a decade it has been! Read this blog post to find out about the planned celebrations for the occasion. CLARIN has enjoyed dedicated support from many people over the years - some have even been involved since its preparatory phase. One of these is Erhard Hinrichs, who is now stepping down as national coordinator for Germany, and we would like to thank him for his significant contribution.

Call for Abstracts (CLARIN2022)
10-12 October 2022, Prague, Czechia

The call for the submission of extended abstracts for the CLARIN Annual Conference 2022 (CLARIN2022) is now open.

The CLARIN Annual Conference is organised for the wider humanities and social sciences community in order to exchange experiences in working with the CLARIN infrastructure, share best practices, and discuss plans for future developments. In 2022, we hope to at least partially return to the traditional face-to-face format, with CLARIN2022 to be held in Prague, Czechia.

Deadline for submissions is 15 April 2022.

Bridging Gaps: Call for Expressions of Interest to Connect CLARIN to External Language Technology Tools 

A new funding instrument has been defined to stimulate small-scale research initiatives (max. duration of eight months) that integrate data and services available through the CLARIN infrastructure with NLP tools and language models existing outside of CLARIN (including deep learning algorithms, external libraries such as SpaCy, or tools available through the European Language Grid). Funded projects should result in a reusable solution for applying an NLP tool to process one (or more) resources deposited at a CLARIN centre. Expressions of interest may be submitted at any time, but the planning should allow the project to provide demonstrable results before mid-August 2022.

Tour de CLARIN Volume IV

The fourth volume of Tour de CLARIN is out now. The first part is dedicated to Portugal, and showcases the consortium and its work, while the second part introduces four K-centres and two B-centres. Similar to previous editions, this volume features introductory articles as well as interviews with researchers from the digital humanities and social sciences. 

Since 2016, Tour de CLARIN has been one of our main outreach initiatives, taking readers on a tour of the diverse CLARIN landscape by introducing national consortia as well as K- and B-centres.

New CLARIN Impact Story

CLARIN’s new Impact Story is about the Rotterdam-based project ‘Stories in Motion: Oral History as Sustainable Data in Urban Settings’. The project is working with a community history project in order to develop a system to digitise, curate and deposit material in openly accessible archives and research repositories. In this way, Stories in Motion makes these oral histories accessible as sustainable data, extending their potential impact within research, education, and the community more widely.

Renewal of K-Centre Certificates

CLARIN is pleased to announce that it has recently renewed ten K-centre certificates. After several certificates expired this summer, the Knowledge Infrastructure Committee (KIC) has been holding meetings with the relevant K-centres in order to discuss how the centres’ activities are developing. These meetings have been very valuable for both parties, with the result that the Board of Directors has approved the renewal of all ten K-centre certificates. 

CLARIN has twenty-six K-centres, covering many fields of expertise. K-centres are established after an application is sent to the KIC. Approved K-centres receive a certificate that is valid for three years. 

New K-centre for Digital and Public Textual Scholarship (DiPText-KC)

DiPText-KC is a centre of CLARIN-IT, and offers expertise relevant to the fields of philological and literary studies, history, art history and cultural heritage.

DiPText-KC aims to share information about digital scholarly editing and text annotation through domain-specific languages, supports scholars in the creation and publication of digital scholarly editions and resources, and organises training activities such as webinars, workshops and summer schools.

Tour de CLARIN: Interview with Zrinka Kolaković

Tour de CLARIN's visit to the CLASSLA K-centre for South Slavic languages includes an interview with Zrinka Kolaković. Dr. Kolaković is a corpus linguist who has used CLASSLA corpora and services such as the noSketch Engine concordancer in her research into the grammatical properties of biaspectual Croatian verbs.

CLARIN Resource Families: Wordlists

The CLARIN Resource Families provide a user-friendly overview of the available language resources in the CLARIN infrastructure for researchers from the digital humanities, social sciences and human language technologies.

This month, CLARIN highlights: Wordlists. Wordlists are lexical resources which only provide alphabetical or frequency-based lexical inventories.

There are fifty-three wordlists in the CLARIN infrastructure. About half (29) of the wordlists are monolingual, accounting for ten languages, while the other half (24) include a variety of both bilingual and multilingual language combinations. In the majority of cases, the wordlists can be directly downloaded from the national repositories or queried through easy-to-use online search environments.

UPDATES FROM CLARIN CONSORTIA

PORTULAN Releases New Language Processing Services with Notebook Technology

What if you could get your hands on a ready piece of code that, besides doing the language processing task you need for your own research: 

• Could seamlessly be run in stepwise fashion (to see exactly what is happening at each procedure)

• Could provide detailed instructional comments associated with its different parts (to understand more thoroughly what is taking place)

• Could easily be edited in your browser (to better adjust to your needs)

• Could be run online (to rapidly prototype the solution you are aiming for)

• Could be run freely in the cloud (to reach results that the computing power of your local machine cannot afford)

• Could be conveniently used in your classes (to help your students learn faster).

To see how all this is becoming possible, you are invited to check the web-based

interfaces to language processing services based on notebooks technology pioneered at PORTULAN CLARIN. In the workbench, just open one of the processing services (e.g. LX-DepParser, LX-NER), click on the notebook button, and play with the provided examples.

Comments and feedback on this inaugural version are most welcome.

BLOGS & REPORTS

Report on the Workshop: Disrupting Digital Monolingualism 

A virtual event took place in June 2020 aimed at mapping the current state of multilingualism in digital theory and practice through, and across, languages and cultures and to strengthen connections between numerous digital and languages-driven conversations and initiatives, among which CLARIN (in line with the CLARIN strategy referred to as ‘European research infrastructure for language as social and cultural data’). The report may interest those working on the following themes:

• Linguistic and geocultural diversity in digital knowledge infrastructures

• Multimodal methods and data 

• Transcultural and translingual approaches to digital study

• Artificial intelligence, machine learning and NLP in language worlds.

ELE Workshop on ‘Achieving Digital Language Equality 2030’

On 18 November 2021, the European Language Equality (ELE) project organised an interactive online workshop on ‘Achieving Digital Language Equality 2030: Implications for Libraries, Collections, and Library Users’. 

The panel of speakers included Maria Eskevich (CLARIN ERIC) and Dr German Rigau (Ixa, HiTZ), both involved in ELE, as well as Jean-François Nominé (Inist, CNRS). The speakers shared their insights and expertise regarding digital language equality and open science, and encouraged discussion with the attendees on the future of digital language technologies.

Launch of the 2021 ESFRI Roadmap

On 7 December 2021, ESFRI presented the 2021 ESFRI Roadmap on large-scale research infrastructures (RIs) during an online celebratory event. The roadmap identifies European investment priorities and provides directions for their further development. It looks into the future challenges of research infrastructure policy and analyses the main features of the RI landscape in Europe to implement an integrated and interconnected research infrastructure ecosystem. CLARIN ERIC has been an ESFRI Landmark since 2016 and is currently part of the ESFRI social and cultural innovation thematic area. 

TRAINING & EDUCATION

Teaching with CLARIN

Watch the interviews with the winners of the 2021 Teaching with CLARIN Award and find out about their teaching experience with CLARIN resources and tools, the challenges they encountered when developing the training materials and how they made them reusable for the community. 

You can watch the interviews here:

• Interview with Mietta Lennes
  • YouTube video: Teaching with CLARIN Winner 2021
  • Materials: Introduction to Speech Analysis | CLARIN ERIC
• Interview with Kristina Pahor de Maiti
  • YouTube video: Teaching with CLARIN Winner 2021
  • Materials: Voices of the Parliament: A Corpus Approach to Parliamentary Discourse Research | CLARIN ERIC
• Interview with Diana Maynard
  • YouTube video: Teaching with CLARIN Winner 2021
  • Materials: GATE Training Course | CLARIN ERIC

If you would like to participate in the Teaching with CLARIN 2022 Award, you are encouraged to submit your teaching material via the following call.

WATCH THIS!

EVENTS & CALLS

The ParlaCLARIN III workshop at LREC2022 will be on the topic of ‘Creating, Enriching and Using Parliamentary Corpora’. Parliamentary (language) data serves as a communication channel between the elected political representatives and members of society, thus reflecting socio-politically relevant information. The development of accessible, comprehensive and well-annotated parliamentary corpora is crucial for a number of disciplines, such as political science, sociology, history, and (socio)linguistics. The workshop will bring together developers, curators and researchers of regional, national and international parliamentary debates from across diverse disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Submissions are welcome from January 2022. Deadline for submissions is 15 March 2022. 

This café will present the new German Text+ research infrastructure, dedicated to text- and language-based research data. Prof. Hinrichs, the scientific spokesperson for Text+ and former member of the CLARIN National Coordinators’ Forum (NCF), will also reflect on the past and future of CLARIN in Germany in the first CLARIN Café of 2022. 

The call for papers for the workshop ‘Digital Parliamentary Data in Action’, co-located with the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB 2022), is now open.

The workshop draws together scholars from different disciplines to explore and showcase results and ongoing work on creating, publishing, and using digital parliamentary data in digital humanities research and applications. The aim is to foster interaction between scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and computational sciences.

Deadline for submissions is 13 January 2022.

The topic of the DARIAH Annual Event 2022 is storytelling, a sense-making and knowledge-creation strategy deeply embedded in human cultures. How we gather, share and use stories says much about who we are, how we entertain and educate, how we build identities and understand the world beyond our vision, how we relate to our past and to our future.

By looking at our research practices and infrastructures through the lens of storytelling, we hope to build conceptual bridges between the arts, technology, humanities, and beyond.

Deadline for submissions is 11 February 2022.

Design the new logo for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), win €5000 and present your work at the next EOSC Symposium! The logo should capture EOSC’s mission of supporting the digital transformation of research. Graphic design students and recent graduates are invited to submit their logo idea until 31 January 2022.