CLARIN Highlights in 2020
2020 has been an exceptional year for all. The pandemic forced us all to switch to new workflows and dynamics, and to look for creative solutions. In spite of the challenges the CLARIN community grew in size and we managed to stay connected through the many variants of virtual collaboration that nowadays colour our lives.
With the turn of the year approaching we proudly present here the CLARIN highlights for 2020 which includes many new initiatives. Visit the webpage to view the holiday card and browse through the links on the ornaments.
We wish all our audiences and partners pleasant holidays and a rewarding 2021.
CLARIN Virtual Events Support
CLARIN has acquired extensive experience in the organisation of virtual events. Given the positive feedback received, CLARIN has decided to put its expertise to the service of its community. CLARIN can provide different kinds of support to virtual event organizers who are representatives of CLARIN members or observers countries, or affiliated with CLARIN centres.
Tour de CLARIN Volume III now Available!
In this third volume of Tour de CLARIN we present six national consortia and six Knowledge Centres that have been visited by Tour de CLARIN in 2020.
Tour de CLARIN is an initiative to introduce national consortia and K-Centres and to highlight what they have to offer to researchers. Interviews conducted with renowned researchers from the digital humanities or social sciences show how they have successfully used the CLARIN infrastructure in their work, how they have collaborated with a K-centre.
Read more about the latest volume
Tour de CLARIN: Iceland
This month Tour de CLARIN visited Iceland. Iceland first joined CLARIN as an observer in November 2018, but after a new law was passed by the Icelandic Parliament on European Research Infrastructure Consortia in 2019, Iceland was able to apply for full membership, which was approved in February 2020. The recent Tour de CLARIN blog posts include an introduction to CLARIN-IS, the tool IceNLP, the resource The Database of Modern Icelandic Inflection and features the launch of the Icelandic National Language Technology Programme in Iceland.
Read more about Tour de CLARIN
CLARIN Resource Families: Multimodal Corpora
The CLARIN Resource Families initiative provides a user-friendly overview of the available language resources in the CLARIN infrastructure for researchers from digital humanities, social sciences and human language technologies.
This month CLARIN highlights multimodal corpora: data collections used to study how two or more modalities interface with one another in human communication. Multimodal corpora are often collections of video and speech recordings accompanied with transcriptions and gesture annotations, and multimodal corpora of textual data supplemented with images exist as well.
CLARIN currently offers 16 multimodal corpora. These corpora are richly annotated for various verbal and non-verbal elements of communication, such as body gesture, gaze direction, and head, eye, and lip movement.
Short Report on the CLARIN K-centre Workshop
A workshop for K-centres was organized by the Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure Committee (KSIC) and took place on 30 November and 1 December. K-centres are an important element of the CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure and all 23 K-centres participated (48 participants). The purpose of the workshop was to create more visibility for the K-centres, outwards – towards the outside world and the users – but also inwards – among the K-centres themselves, in order to improve their collaboration. An additional purpose was to make K-centres aware of the various instruments at their disposal. The workshop was successful and will be followed up in various ways.
2nd Workshop of the PORTULAN CLARIN Network of Implementation Partners
On December 3, Portuguese Research Infrastructure for the Science and Technology of Language (PORTULAN CLARIN) organized online the second workshop for its implementation partners’ network. The main objective of the workshop was to update partners about the state of the art and discuss further steps to improve the PORTULAN infrastructure, taking into consideration actual and future users.
The partners were very enthusiastic with all that was achieved to make PORTULAN CLARIN special and unique with its: user-friendly interface, 4 certifications (e.g. Core Trust Seal, CLARIN K-centre), more than 20 processing tools (e.g., LX-Tagger, LX-Syllabifier) and a repository with over 300 scientific resources.
BLOGS
Takeaways from the SSHOC Vocabulary Information Sessions Webinar Series on Open-Source Vocabulary Hosting and Management Platforms
As part of the SSHOC activities, CLARIN organized three separate virtual information sessions where members of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) community could learn about and evaluate leading vocabulary management and publication platforms Wikibase, Skosmos, and the CESSDA Vocabulary service. The sessions took place during September 2020.
Read about the main takeaways of these sessions in the SSHOC blog post.
The slides and the recordings of the SSHOC Vocabulary Information Sessions are available on the event page.
WATCH THIS!
Café@CLARIN2020: This is CLARIN. How Can We Help You?
The CLARIN Café session "This is CLARIN. How can we help you?" took place during CLARIN2020. What is CLARIN all about? How can CLARIN help? What does it have to offer to researchers, lecturers and students? And how does using the CLARIN Infrastructure help them during their research projects? This Café gave an overview of CLARIN in a nutshell and helped the audience to get familiarized with the CLARIN Infrastructure.
EVENTS & CALLS
AIUCD 2021 - DHs for Society: E-quality, Participation, Rights and Values in the Digital Age
19 - 22 January 2021, virtual event
AIUCD 2021 aims to be a moment of study and reflection on Digital Humanities (DH) as a privileged meeting place among different needs of contemporary society in research, politics, economics and everyday life, giving the humanist the role of interpreter and facilitator of change. One of the keynote speakers will be Prof. Franciska de Jong (CLARIN Executive Director). During the pre-conference workshop day on 19 January 2021, a CLARIN Café-Espresso (inspired by the CLARIN Café series) will be held.
Due to the Covid-19 dynamics, the Programme Committee transformed AIUCD 2021 into a virtual event with the collaboration of CLARIN-IT and the support of CLARIN ERIC.
Call for Participation Next DELAD Workshop
27-28 January 2021, virtual event
DELAD organizes its fifth workshop around sharing corpora of Speech with Communication Disorders (CSD). This workshop, supported by CLARIN ERIC, will be held online in selected time slots and will focus on the following topics:
- presentations by researchers about their CSD;
- help from the CLARIN Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (ACE) in sharing CSD;
- how Data Protection Impact Assessments can help to develop standards for sharing research data, and role play in applying these for CSD;
- how to access and deposit existing data at CLARIN centres, profiles of metadata, consent forms;
- keynote Rob van Son: Use voice conversion for pseudonymisation?
More information and registration
Call for Papers: Digital Humanities Congress 2021
22 – 24 July 2021, University of Sheffield, UK
The call for papers for the Digital Humanities Congress 2021 is open. The purpose of the conference is to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities. This three-day conference will be held in Sheffield and will be a physical conference unless prevented by the Covid-19 situation.
The deadline for submissions is 31 January 2021.
