Opening speech by Pim Levelt

It is a great pleasure for me to help kick-off this kick-off meeting of Clarin and I will tell you why. This first pan-European Clarin Conference is hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. When we founded this Institute over 30 years ago here in Nijmegen, our first great deed was to appoint Peter Wittenburg to engineer our language laboratory. It would have been unthinkable then, for both him and me, to imagine anything like CLARIN. There were no digital language repositories around of any appreciable size.

Twenty-five years ago the Institute started coordinating a pan-European project on the untutored second language acquisition of guest workers, as they were then called. They came from different mother tongues and acquired a wide range ‘host’ languages. I still remember how Peter Wittenburg insisted that each team would be provided with a Personal Computer, a total novelty; the European Science Foundation, which funded part of the project, was pretty shocked by that suggestion. The research data base that was then created is still being used for research in second language acquisition. For those of you who have been involved in this then largest ever cross-European language research project, I have the sad news that the project’s excellent director, Clive Perdue, passed away this weekend in Paris.

Only a few years later we began constructing CELEX, a Dutch, German, English repository of lexical information extracted from large text bases. When Peter ordered the huge discs for storing these data on, he told me that CELEX would contain over a gigabyte of data and I was duly impressed. Good old CELEX is still very much in use.

Similar developments were taking place all over Europe. Many if not most of us here have at some moment become involved in some hesitant creation of a dedicated linguistic data base of sorts, a lexical repository, a text base, a multimodal data base, what have you. And increasingly, many of us crossed roads, began cooperating, but also competing, quarrelling about standards, about funding, about effective organization. Animosities were all around but, thanks heaven, there was also much sensibility, much wisdom, much willingness to jointly invent a better world for all of us in the humanities and social sciences, whose advanced research was becoming dependent on access to and use of digital language data. Many of these wise, sensible and constructive minds are here together in this city hall.

What Peter and I could not possibly conceive of 30 years ago, was that we would be operating in the petabyte domain – that word didn’t even exist then. We could not possibly foresee that the humanities would become as much affected by technology as had been the case for the natural sciences since the nineteenth century. It was information technology, not measurement  technology, that would revolutionize the humanities. The revolution is not just in their methodology, their practice, but in the very core issues they are addressing.

It is the mission of the humanities to help our communities shape an evidence-based self-image. Who are we? How have we become what we are? Where are we going; can we create a sustainable society? These are the core questions of human existence and each culture is involved in providing at least parts of the answer. That image of our own, human identity has to be permanently updated, refined and tested. And often under great pressure. Traditional communities, once the main suppliers of insight and ethics, are rapidly being replaced by virtual communities at the scale of a nation, a continent or totally globalized. Such communities can be created quite rapidly and they can become quite effective. The first effective and totally surprising global case has been the protest movement around the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, 1998.

Languages and cultures interact at a scale never seen before. The humanities must conceive of entirely new ways of transmitting and providing reliable information about our human condition to new generations, who will have to find their way in an exciting, but also confusing information era.

It is exactly initiatives like CLARIN that are needed to provide the humanities and social sciences with the tools they will need to carry out that mission. It is not CLARIN carrying it out, but CLARIN making it possible. CLARIN will make it possible for the humanities to interact at a scale that is needed for sketching much fuller pictures of our cultural, linguistic and social heritage. These pictures are not necessarily texts. They can as well will be virtual travels through space and time. But they will be thoroughly evidence-based, peer-reviewed as it were. It will create entirely new kinds of scholarship and education, not yet predictable.

It seems to me that CLARIN can become trend-setting in the world of humanities. Its laboratory will largely consist of European sources, the richest ever in cultural history. Its organization is heterarchical, distributed. The 32 participating countries will all bring in their local specialists, organizations and funding. And most importantly, CLARIN will be ‘owned’ by the scholars and scientists involved. There will be no GOOGLE telling us what we should like, what we should save, what we should analyze.

What will we see, looking back 30 years from now? Well, ..., not me of course, but all of you. We will be meeting in Beijing, the Chinese having acquired all of the world’s information networking systems, including Internet. CLARIN is, by then, spelled in Chinese characters, but otherwise it has survived all dramatic changes in power structure, such as the US having become a protectorate of the UN since it became broke due to the evaporation of its financial institutions. We will then commemorate a 2008 meeting in Nijmegen, which turned out to be the beginning of the so-called “era of humanities”. We will gratefully remember our step-wise liberation from internet companies and publishing houses, the humanities becoming the sole owners of their intellectual property, superbly managing it, developing it, and making it generously available to the general public. Yes, and some of the senior CLARIN members will even manage to recollect the utopian words spoken at that Nijmegen meeting by some old Max Planck guy and they will be heartily amused.

Predicting, we all know, is hard, especially if it concerns the future. Also hard, but less so, is planning for the future. That is exactly what you are up to these days in Nijmegen and Kleve. Under the able coordination of Steven Krauwer, chair of the Executive Board, the eight board members will skillfully kick off their working groups. It will, no doubt, be both a challenge and a pleasure to launch all this in the coming three days. So let me both congratulate you all and express my best wishes for flying start of this wonderful enterprise.

Pim Levelt