More than the whole year has passed since our project has started. It may seem that it passed too quickly, but if we turn around and count all consortium meetings, workshops, dedicated thematic and technical meetings at the level or the whole CLARIN project only, I am confident that we can be satisfied by their number. In that respect, we have already achieved a remarkable set of goals, but we are not even in the middle of our first, preparatory and planning phase of the whole CLARIN infrastructure.
The retrospect of our first year and prospect for the following two years is the topic of this number’s title page, written by the author who is certainly the most appropriate for that — Steven Krauwer, our coordinator. His ability to put in concise yet perfectly understandable way topics that usually demand several pages to be explained is always striking. In this contribution he also gave us a warm push in the back that is always needed in order to finish our job properly.
Our initial editorial intention for this issue was to organise it around the report on selected humanities project that would exemplify the potential and role of
LRT in humanities research (one of primary tasks of WP3). Due to the change in schedule in that working package, this original idea had to be abandoned. Instead, we are covering a broad range of different events organized as thematic or national meetings.
The first one is an expert meeting on metadata (presented by Peter Wittenburg, Maria Gavrilidou and Erhard Hinrichs) where this topic of utmost importance for building the federation of different e-archives was tackled.
The establishing of CLARIN-CAT, the Catalan offspring of the CLARIN project in the form of round tables is covered by the contribution by Eva Revilla from University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.
The report from the FLaReNet Launching Event that took place in Vienna is presented by Marko Tadić. The FLaReNet project is closely related to CLARIN so we should keep an eye on it constantly, particularly having in mind that both of project share a great deal of participants.
The central part of this issue, pages six and seven, are covered with the thorough report from the WP2/WP5 three day workshop held in Oxford from the keyboard of Dieter van Uytvanck. In this workshop some relevant problems were presented and important decisions were made and it is certainly worthwhile to get acquainted with them.
The following pages are covered by our national correspondents. They are either presenting a particular case-studies, like the project INQ1258 from Portugal (page eight), or they are presenting a situation and development in the field of LRT in different countries. Thus on page nine we have a brief description of many activities in Sweden, covering main LR projects/institutions that will play a crucial role once the CLARIN infrastructure will be established.
On page ten you can read about the situation in France and which institutions are involved in LRT production.
The development of Latvian CLARIN, its prospects for national funding and first national seminar is given on page eleven.
We hope that you will, as always, enjoy the reading of this newsletter.
