CLARIN Ambassadors Programme

Introduction

The aim of the CLARIN Ambassadors Programme is to raise awareness about and encourage participation in CLARIN ERIC in disciplines and communities that are not yet fully integrated in CLARIN.

Ambassadors are appointed with a two-year mandate to actively promote CLARIN by:

Seeking opportunities to promote CLARIN within relevant projects, scholarly networks, institutions, and research infrastructures
Attending key events in their field to actively promote CLARIN with keynote talks, panel discussions, masterclasses etc.
Generating visibility for their activities through CLARIN's newsletter, website and other promotional formats, such as interviews, blog posts, and brochures.

CLARIN Ambassadors

Johanna Berg CLARIN Ambassador 2022-2024

Johanna Berg works on digital development at the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden. She has been working on digital issues connected to cultural heritage since around 2007 and has held positions within the field at, among others, the National Archives and the National Heritage Board. During the 2010s she was based at Digisam, a governmental initiative to support digital development in the heritage/GLAM sector. She played a central role in the collaborative work that resulted in the Guiding principles for working with digital cultural heritage (2015). When the Swedish Clarin network formed she was the Digisam/National Archives representative in the group, and she held that post the first couple of years. She co-authored the Swe-Clarin Handbok with Leif-Jöran Olsson at Språkbanken Text. She took active part in the speech project Tilltal, in collaboration with the Institute for Language and Folklore (Isof) and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden (2017-2020), and has also been on the panel for cultural infrastructure at Swedish research funder Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2020-2022). She is a longtime advocate for open knowledge and public access to cultural heritage collections, and since 2020 on the board of the Swedish Wikimedia chapter.

Eva Soroli CLARIN Ambassador 2021-2023

Eva Soroli is Associate Professor of Psycholinguistics at the University of Lille (France), Lead of the Language Re-appropriation team of the CNRS (National Centre of Scientific Research) STL lab. She is member of the National Committee on Language Sciences (Section 34),of the Interdisciplinary Commission Science and Data (CID 55) of the CNRS, and member of the CLARIN Knowledge Centre CORLI of the French Infrastructure for Digital Humanities Huma-Num. Trained in linguistics, cognitive science and psycholinguistics, she was awarded her MSc at the University of Paris-Sud Saclay, and her PhD at the University of Paris 8. She is interested in the relationship between language and thought in typical and atypical populations (main research areas: cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics and neurolinguistics). Her current projects involve experimental and corpus investigations from a cross-linguistic perspective combining offline and online data (e.g., oral elicited corpora, non-verbal data, eye tracking, reaction times) on several research domains: bilingualism, L1/L2 acquisition, language assessment, aphasia speech, language and cognitive processing. Watch the video interview with Eva Soroli here.

Paul Rayson CLARIN Ambassador 2021-2023

Paul Rayson is a Professor of Natural Language Processing at Lancaster University, UK and Director of the UCREL interdisciplinary research centre which carries out research in corpus linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). A long-term focus of his work is semantic multilingual NLP in extreme circumstances where language is noisy e.g. in historical, learner, speech, email, txt and other CMC varieties. Along with domain experts, he has applied his research in the areas of dementia detection, mental health, online child protection, cyber security, learner dictionaries, and text mining of biomedical literature, historical corpora, and financial narratives. He was a co-investigator of the five-year ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), which is designed to bring the corpus approach to bear on a range of social sciences. He is also a member of the multidisciplinary Institute Security Lancaster, the Lancaster Digital Humanities Hub, and the Data Science Institute. Watch the interview with Paul Rayson here.

Satu Saalasti CLARIN Ambassador 2021-2023

Satu Saalasti works as a University lecturer of Speech and Language Pathology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interest is in the multimodality of communication especially in clinical populations. Her doctoral thesis focused on multisensory speech perception and comprehension of instructions in individuals with Asperger Syndrome. During her post doctoral studies she has studied the neural characteristics of listening to, reading and lip-reading a naturalistic narrative with functional magnetic resonance imaging. She is also a steering group member of DELAD - initiative, which is promoting sharing disordered speech data among researchers.

Past CLARIN Ambassadors

Francesca Frontini CLARIN Ambassador 2019-2021

Dr Francesca Frontini obtained her PhD from the University of Pavia with a thesis on corpus linguistics. She then joined the Institute for Computational Linguistics in Pisa as a post-doctoral researcher and worked on several European projects with a focus on computational lexicography and natural language processing. After a four year parenthesis as an associate professor at the Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier, she recently returned to ILC as a permanent researcher. Her research interests lie at the crossroads of natural language processing and digital humanities. She is particularly interested in named entity annotation for digital editions, as well as digital methods for the analysis of literary texts and literary criticism. Together with Carmen Brando she developed REDEN, a tool for named entity linking. She is a member of the steering committee of the ADHO Special Interest Group for Digital Literary Stylistics as well as the Nénufar project which aims to digitise and publish a diachronic corpus of historical editions of the French Dictionary Petit Larousse Illustré.

Maciej Maryl CLARIN Ambassador 2019-2021

Dr Maciej Maryl is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN); founding Director of the Digital Humanities Centre at IBL PAN. He is a member of Teksty Drugie and OpenMethods Editorial Boards and represents IBL PAN at DARIAH-PL Steering Board and OPERAS Core Group. He co-chairs DARIAH Digital Methods and Practices Observatory and is a member of ALLEA E-humanities Working Group. In 2013 he defended his PhD thesis dedicated to the literary life online. His research interests cover literary communication, multimedia writing, digital editorship, digital humanities and the relationship between technology and culture. He currently chairs a COST action New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent (NEP4DISSENT) and leads IBL PAN research team in the H2020 project Shaping interdisciplinary practices in Europe (SHAPE-ID). In cooperation with CLARIN-PL he contributes to the development of Literary Exploration Machine (LEM), a web-based, language-processing tool for SSH scholars working with texts in Polish.

Toine Pieters CLARIN Ambassador 2019-2021

Prof. Toine Pieters is Head of the Freudenthal Institute and Senior Fellow of the Descartes Institute of the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University. He has been project leader and research coordinator of multiple projects in the digital humanities field (WAHSP [CLARIN], BILAND [CLARIN], Translantis [NWO], Asymenc [HERA], Dream [NWO] and Time Capsule [NWO]). The latter project aimed at connecting and integrating disparate data sources through linked data approaches to re-contextualise lost historical and cultural contexts. He is currently project leader of Utrecht Time Machine and represents Utrecht University in the European Time Machine consortium. This project aims at using space and time as shared references across domains, disciplines and cultures within the dynamic context of urban geographies.

CLARIN Café

The CLARIN Café is an informal and interactive space where researchers, lecturers and students can meet. This cafe is inititated by the CLARIN Ambassadors. For more detailed information, please visit CLARIN Café page.

If you have any questions regarding the CLARIN Ambassadors Programme, please email us at ambassadors@clarin.eu