Role of languages

Language is ubiquitous within (and even outside) the humanities. The volume of written texts and (more recently) recorded spoken and multimodal texts is enormous, and it is growing exponentially. The sheer size of this material makes the use of computer aided methods indispensable for many scholars in the humanities and in neighboring areas who are concerned with language material. An ever increasing amount of texts and recordings have been digitized or are directly created in digital form, which increases the need for and readiness to resort to computer-aided methods. At the same time it requires highly specialized technical skills and expertise to make the application of computers effective and efficient.

Computer aided language processing is already used by a wide variety of communities in different sub-disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences, such as history, arts, literature, cultural studies, law, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, theology, and, of course, within linguistics (the study of language) in different sub-disciplines such as dialectology, discourse studies, language acquisition, language documentation, language and speech technology, lexicography, phonetics, typology, etc.

These communities comprise not only professional researchers and educators, but also policy makers, people from public administration and from industry, as well as interested individuals. All these communities address one or more of the multiple roles language plays in the study of the humanities, such as (i) a carrier of cultural content and knowledge, both synchronically and diachronically, (ii) an instrument for inter-human communication within and across languages, (iii) one of the central components of a person’s, a group’s, a culture’s or a nation’s identity and (iv) an object of study or preservation.

The effort needed to exploit the possibilities offered by language resources is considerable, independent of the discipline, the language, and the role of language addressed. The cost of collecting, digitising and annotating large texts, speech corpora, dictionaries or language descriptions is enormous in terms of time and money. The creation of tools to manipulate these language data is even more demanding in terms of skills and expertise, especially if they have to be accessible for non-professionals. At the same time it should be noted that many of the data collections, and tools, produced for one purpose/community can be re-used for other purposes by other communities, provided that (i) one is aware of the existence of these materials, (ii) one has access to these materials, and (iii) one has access to the specific expertise needed to put the materials to use in one’s own context, or needs.