This double issue of CLARIN Newsletter was, according to the original project plan, intended to be the last one. It was our intention to have two separate issues, number 11 at the end of 2010 and number 12 that would herald 2011, and document the six-month extension of project.
Due to a series of unexpected events, it turned out that our initial editorial plan had to be adjusted, so you have in front of you the double issue 11-12 that covers the planned period by dates, but certainly not by the time of its appearance.
Therefore we decided that CLARIN project, its consortium partners and the community that has built around them in previous three years deserve a proper final and closing issue. Issue number 13 will pave the way to the CLARIN infrastructure in its full form.
How CLARIN is perceived from the other side of Atlantic is the topic of the front page contribution by Brian MacWhinney. The Memorandum of Understanding between CLARIN and META-NET documents how the language technology scene, after some time, is working to connect together the relevant initiatives. We publish it in its entirety because we believe this gives the long awaited opportunity to the community to coordinate its efforts at large.
Peter Wittenburg presents several possible offspring of the projects CLARIN and DARIAH within the new call for research infrastructure projects. We will certainly hear more about them in the issue to come. One of the most notable use cases of usage of language resources and technologies (LRT) in the Humanities is the CLARIN-supported project on the analysis of folk tales is presented by Piroska Lendvai and Thierry Declerck. This topic has been presented at several digital humanities conferences, and has attracted increasing interest.
The combination of textual and geographical analysis of 17th century manuscript of the Romanian traveller Nicolae Milescu's Iter in Chinam, is another case that clearly shows how digital humanities depend on LRT but also how LRT has to be combined with other types of information.
Our middle pages are oriented, as usual, to the presentation of important events connected to CLARIN. First we have the report by Hetty Winkel from SDH-NEERI 2010 conference that took place in Vienna in October and is the major event jointly organized by CLARIN and DARIAH. It is followed by reports from two LRT conferences that embraced Europe from two sides, South-East and North. These are Formal Approaches to South-Slavic and Balkan Languages (FASSBL7) and the fourth Baltic HLT conference. These two show how LT has spread accros the Europe and is growing mature at the regional and not just national level.
The first META-FORUM is presented by Aljoscha Burchardt and Georg Rehm, since after the LREC2010 conference, it has been the LRT event in Europe that collected the largest number of participants.
Our issues regularly end with reports on the status of language resources and technologies from different European countries. We are bringing you the reports from four countries in this double issue: Israel, Iceland, Turkey and Slovakia. Each of them depicts a different situation and varying levels of development of LRT, but what can be noticed is that all these efforts are oriented to a common goal. If we contributed so far to this common goal with our editorial work on the previous issues of CLARIN Newsletter, we certainly hope that we did not disappoint you with this one either.
Enjoy your reading!
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