CLARIN News

Invitation for CLARA Summer School 2010 on "Advanced Resource Creation, Archiving and Usage" in Nijmegen (Netherlands) on 5-16 July 2010

Young PhDs and Postdocs who are going to work on/with language resources in their work are invited for an international CLARA summer school on "Advanced Resource Creation, Archiving and Usage" in Nijmegen (Netherlands), on 5-16 July 2010. The summer school is part of the European CLARA project (Common Language Resources and their Applications, https://clara.uib.no/). CLARA is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network. This CLARA Summer School will be organised by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (http://mpi.nl/).

The summer school aims to train young researchers in how to use modern technology to create language resources in particular when the source material are multimedia streams, how the resulting complex resource types can be archived, how they can be accessed and analyzed via state-of-the-art (web) applications and how they can be enriched.

There is no participation fee. The final deadline for applications for the CLARA Summer School 2010 is 30 April 2010. Please note: You don't have to be a member of an organisation involved in CLARA to apply for this event.

After successfully applying for the CLARA Summer School 2010, you should soon organise your accomodation because a very big Nijmegen event will start on 17 July 2010.

Further information (incl. travel & accomodation) and the registration form can be found on the Summer School website:

http://www.mpi.nl/research/research-projects/language-archiving-technology/events/clara-summerschool/

If you have any questions about the CLARA Summer School 2010 in Nijmegen, please feel free to contact Thomas Koller (thomas.koller@mpi.nl)

Job Opportunity in Oxford

The Oxford e-Research Centre is recruiting a research assistant on a 6-month contract to work on developing interoperability of the OTA and other repositories involved in the CLARIN project. More details at http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/jobs.

Completed applications must be received by 12 noon on 12^th March 2010, interviews will be held mid to late March 2010.

Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks - CHAIN

A meeting was held at King's College, London, on 26^th and 27^th October 2009, between representatives of the following networks, infrastructure projects, and planning initiatives working with digital technologies in the Arts and Humanities:

arts-humanities.net (http://www.arts-humanities.net/)
ADHO - Association of Digital Humanities Organisations (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/)
CLARIN (http://www.clarin.eu/)
centerNet (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/centernet/)
DARIAH (http://www.dariah.eu/)
NoC - Network of Expert Centres in Great Britain and Ireland (http://www.arts-humanities.net/noc/)
Project Bamboo (http://projectbamboo.org/)
TextGrid (http://www.textgrid.de/)

We identified the current fragmented environment where researchers operate in separate areas with often mutually incompatible technologies as a barrier to fully exploiting the transformative role that these technologies can potentially play. We resolved that our present, proposed, and future activities are interdependent and complementary and should be oriented towards working together to overcome barriers, and to create a shared environment where technology services can interoperate and be sustained, thus enabling new forms of research in the Humanities.

In order to achieve these goals we agreed to form the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks – CHAIN. CHAIN will act as a forum forareas of shared interest to its participants, including:

- advocacy for an improved digital research infrastructure for the Humanities;

- development of sustainable business models;

- promotion of technical interoperability of resources, tools and services;

- promotion of good practice and relevant technical standards;

- development of a shared service infrastructure;

- coordinating approaches to legal and ethical issues;

- interactions with other relevant computing infrastructure initiatives;

- widening the geographical scope of our coalition.

CHAIN will promote an open culture where experiences, including successes and failures, can be shared and discussed, in order to support and promote the use of digital technologies in research in the Humanities.

Sheila Anderson, King's College, London (DARIAH)

Andreas Aschenbrenner, State and University Library Göttingen (TextGrid, DARIAH)

David Greenbaum, University of California, Berkeley (Project Bamboo)

Seth Denbo, King's College, London (DARIAH)

Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland (centerNet)

Chad Kainz, University of Chicago (Project Bamboo)

Steven Krauwer, Utrecht University (CLARIN)

Lorna Hughes, King's College, London (ADHO, NoC)

Tobias Blanke, King's College, London (DARIAH)

Torsten Reimer, King's College, London (arts-humanities.net)

David Robey, University of Oxford (NoC)

Harold Short, King's College, London (ADHO)

Katherine Walter, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (centerNet)

Peter Wittenburg, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (CLARIN)

Martin Wynne, University of Oxford (CLARIN, DARIAH)

CLARA is starting to recruit researchers!

The CLARA project is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network in the area of Common Language Resources and their Applications.

CLARA will have vacancies for 17 researchers in specific research tasks and for specific durations. These vacancies will be announced on the
CLARA website (http://clara.uib.no), together with instructions on how to apply. All positions are subject to strict eligibility criteria.
There are two types of researcher positions:

Early Stage Researcher (ESR): postgraduate without PhD degree and with less than 4 years of research experience (after obtaining master diploma or equivalent)
Experienced Researcher (ER): researcher with less than 5 years of research experience and with PhD or at least 4 years of research experience

All positions imply mobility, that is, are open only to researchers coming from different countries than the country where they will be appointed. Researchers will get a salary and social benefits which are normal for the country of employment. In addition, researchers will get additional allowances to compensate for mobility and travel costs.

Positions are announced on the CLARA website (http://clara.uib.no) under the menu item Vacancies. They are also announced on Euraxess. Applications must be addressed to the employing organization, as indicated in each separate announcement. In addition to general CLARA
conditions, local conditions may apply.

Open Access Week: Open Data Speakers Corner at DANS

DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) will host a virtual Speakers Corner during the international Open Access Week from 19 through 23 October with the aim of giving a big push to the debate on free access to research data. Famed experts are gearing up to provide contributions that will be talked about.

The Open Access Week calls for attention to the importance of free access to scientific publications. DANS, the Netherlands national institute for storage and accessibility of research data in the social sciences and humanities, seizes that week to force the free availability of research data in particular higher on the agenda. When such data become widely available for reuse, many more opportunities for innovative research will ensue.

To that end, DANS is organizing the Open Data Speakers Corner at http://www.opendataspeakerscorner.nl . Each day of the week, the discussion will be opened from the special point of view of a well known person in the realm of scientific research, policy, publishing and the libraries. Three tried and tested debaters, especially asked to do so by DANS, will respond after which visitors are free to step onto the soapbox as well. All invited contributions wil be posted in Dutch and English.

On Monday 19 October, the special angle will be that of science policy, with VSNU chair Sijbolt Noorda as kick-off columnist. On Tuesday 20 October, the vision of the data users will take center stage when economic historian Jan Luiten van Zanden opens the discussion. Wednesday 21 October will be used to highlight the perspective of scientific libraries. Director Bas Savenije of the National Library of the Netherlands is scheduled to set the tone that day. On Thursday 22 October, the science publishers will be headlining and Rafael Sidi, vice president Product Management at Elsevier ScienceDirect, will perform the countdown. Finally, the perspective of the data producers will be featured on the last day of the week. Director Marcel Das of CentERdata will have the first word.

Contributions were procured from, among others, Theo Mulder (KNAW), Ron Dekker (NWO), Marlene Sikkens (OCW), John Mackenzie Owen (University of Amsterdam), Kees Aarts (Twente University), Maria Heijne (Technical University Delft), Kurt de Belder (Universiteit Leiden), Andrew Treloar (Australian National Data Archive), Saskia de Vries (Amsterdam University Press), Cees van ‘t Veen (Natural Heritage Board) and Jan Donner (KIT) as debaters.

The web site for the occasion will go live on Monday morning early. It can also be accessed via the web site of organizer DANS: http://www.dans.knaw.nl .