CLARIN Newsletter no 8

Welcome, dear readers, to the issue of CLARIN Newsletter that closes the second year of our preparatory phase. Looking back to the initial, preliminary and preparatory meetings from three years ago it would be hard to imagine that our idea of research infrastructure for humanities and social sciences will start to shape up so soon. CLARIN started to attract interest from other related fields, but also from the direction of top level scientists who are involved in strategic planning and directing the science policy in Europe today. One of such figures is certainly John Wood, chair of the ERA Board who made a contribution to our front page reminding us of the tedious and not always straightforward process of discussing and accepting RI proposals that passed ESFRI filtering.

Other contributions in this issue also reflect the stage of the project we are in at the moment: the planning is well advanced, the first Startup Federation of Service Providers is being built and Kirster Lindér has report on that recent development.

The monumental digitisation project Monumenta Linguae Dacoromanorum: The 1688 Bible Project is presented by Gabriela Haja and Emil Munteanu. This project clearly shows how LR&T in humanities could provide the necessary shift in research paradigme thus leading to the e-Humanities in the proper sense.

This time the central part of the Newsletter is reserved for NEERI Manifesto which clearly requests that copyrighted material should be freely available for research purpuses in the Information Society and Knowledge Economy which we are both facing.

RI without knowledgeable users serves no purpose, so CLARINers soon realised that another project dealing with training users and maintainers of CLARIN RI is needed. The start of this project named CLARA is described in a contribution by Koenraad de Smedt.

Our traditional report on national CLARIN and LR&T situation this time comes from Hungary and from the keyboard of Tamás Váradi.

Enjoy your reading.