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CLARIN Newsflash July 2017

Re-assessments of Two CLARIN B-centres Concluded Successfully 

The CLARIN Centre at University of Copenhagen and Meertens/HuC CLARIN Centre have both been successfully re-assessed as certified CLARIN B-centres according to the current criteria and have received a renewed B-certification. 

The CLARIN Centre at University of Copenhagen  
At the CLARIN Centre at University of Copenhagen researchers have access to language resources and tools that are deposited by researchers from several universities and institutes. The platform is still developing and contains mostly textual and lexical resources – but also a few audios, videos, and annotations of these. The platform is maintained by CLARIN-DK, the Danish CLARIN initiative.

Meertens/HuC CLARIN Centre
The Meertens Instituut is an active participant, firstly in Dutch CLARIN, and now CLARIAH. Meertens is leading the CLARIAH NL WP3 work package. Meertens is in a clustering process with its KNAW sister institutes HuygensING and IISG: the KNAW Humanities Cluster (HuC). This will lead to further collaboration between the collection and archiving management of the three institutes. As a first step the Meertens CLARIN Centre has renamed to Meertens/HuC CLARIN Centre. 

CLARIN congratulates the centres and thanks all persons involved, in particular those responsible at the B-centre and the members of the assessment committees.

 

Digital Humanities Benelux Conference 2017 

The DHBenelux conference is an initiative that aims to disseminate digital humanities projects in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg, and foster collaboration between them. DHBenelux organizes an annual conference in one of the Benelux countries. The conference serves as a platform for DH researchers and offers an opportunity for members of the DH community to meet, present research, demonstrate tools, and discuss projects.

The fourth DHBenelux Conference took place at Utrecht University in the Netherlandsfrom Monday 3 to Wednesday 5 July 2017. We were delighted to see so much involvement of the CLARIN community in the conference proceedings, as well as our colleagues from CLARIAHDARIAH-EU & PARTHENOS. Click here to view the list of contributions to DHBenelux2017 from CLARIN, CLARIAH, DARIAH-EU & PARTHENOS.

During the conference a Bazaar was organized on Tuesday 4 July, where the recently re-launched CLARIN-DARIAH course registry for DH courses was demonstrated. For more info, click here.

As a satellite event, on Thursday 6 July, a joint PARTHENOS-CLARIN-DARIAH workshop on the FAIR principles for data management took place. Click here for an overview of the workshop and here to view the slides from the presentation on the FAIR principles in CLARIN by Franciska de Jong and Dieter Van Uytvanck.

You can follow up on the conference Twitter activity via Storify. We also took some pictures, which you can view here


'Empirical Data in Linguistics' 

From 21 to 23 June 2017, the national project JANES in cooperation with the Slovene consortium CLARIN.SI organized the fifth ReLDI seminar “Empirical data in linguistics”. The seminar, which took place at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Ljubljana, was attended by 50 participants from 5 former Yugoslavian republics. Read a guest blog post written by Ana Slavec and Jakob Lenardič, and published on CLARIN’s blog here.


CLARIN at the Lancaster University Corpus Linguistics Summer School (27- 30 June 2017)

Corpus Linguistics for Language Studies is a summer school aimed at students studying Linguistics or Language studies, who want to develop skills in corpus methods. Sponsored by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and UCREL at Lancaster University – one of the world’s leading and longest-established centres for corpus-based research – this was the seventh event in a highly successful series that began in 2011.

One session on the third day was about CLARIN: Infrastructural support for the study and use of language as social and cultural data, where Darja Fišer, CLARIN’s Director of User Involvement introduced resources and tools for research. Read more about it on Sociolinguini blog here.


Photo Credit: Sociolinguini blog


New CLARIN Style Guide is now Available Online

Information about the CLARIN visual identity is now available on the website. It includes information on fonts, colours and logos.


New Oral History CLARIN C-Centre in France

The Mediterranean Research Center for the Humanities / Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l'homme (MMSH) Sound Archive Center ‘phonothèque’ is an archival research center, created at the end of the 1970’s by Philippe Joutard, a contemporary historian, and Jean-Claude Bouvier, a specialist in ethnic dialects. Both wished not only to preserve their recordings and to have field interviews published, but also seeked to make their sources available for the general public. When the sound archive center was integrated in the MMSH in 1997 it opened to all the Humanities and Social Sciences with a focus on the Mediterranean area.

The Phonothèque contains more than 8000 hours of sound archives field recordings. More than 7000 hours have been digitized and searchable in an online catalogue and highlighted in a scholarly blog here. Around 3000 hours of sound recordings are directly accessible online. Phonothèque's metadata are available with an open Creative Commons licence (CC-0).
 

Tour de CLARIN: Sweden

"Tour de CLARIN" is a CLARIN ERIC User Involvement initiative that aims to periodically highlight prominent user involvement activities of a particular CLARIN national consortium - you can find out more here.  In June and July 2017 ‘Tour de CLARIN’ focuses on Sweden, with the two latest blog posts highlighting the Korp tool and the tutorial and workshop on automatic sentence selection from corpora.

 

Data Citation and Attribution in Linguistics: Toward a Common Standard

We are delighted to announce that the Linguistics Data Interest Group (LDIG) is now a recognised interest group within the Research Data Alliance ( ) and its Charter Statement is available online here. As it will move towards greater standardisation of expectations and formatting of data citation, we hope that CLARIN community will be able to actively contribute to it. The LDIG will be attending the RDA's 10th Plenary Meeting in Montreal in September to start discussion of a data citation standard in linguistics. Read more about the event here.
 

Impact Survey: How does Digital Cultural Heritage Impact You?

Europeana needs your help! Discovering cultural heritage online can change how you see the world around you. So, for the last couple of months Europeana has been focusing on exploring how users and researchers see cultural heritage online through one of the services Europeana provides or supports.

They are specifically looking to hear from people who have come across the thematic collections of Fashion and Photography, and the Europeana Research website. Perhaps you follow one of them on Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter? 

Click here to find out more and participate in the survey.

If you have any questions about this survey or what Europeana Impact Assessment Task Forcewill do with the results, please contact them at impact [at] europeana.eu (impact[at]europeana[dot]eu)
 

Join the ADHO Steering Committee!

The Alliance of Digital Humanities (ADHO) is looking for enthusiastic Digital Humanists who would like to actively help further DH in all its breadth and diversity on a global scale. The ADHO Steering Committee (SC) has several vacancies to be filled, starting August 8, 2017, until July 1st 2018 (when the governance structure of ADHO will change). Extensions of service in some comparable roles after July 1, 2018, may be considered.

More details can be found here

 


WATCH THIS!


 
Watch selected talks from CLARIN-PLUS workshop 'Creation & Use of Social Media Resources' that took place in Kaunas, Lithuania from Thursday, 18 May, to Friday, 19 May, 2017. The videos are now on VideoLectures.NET.
 


EVENTS  & CALLS


Teaching NLP for Digital Humanities *** Extended Deadline: Sunday, 23 July 2017
Berlin, Germany, 12 September 2017

Computational linguists often teach digital humanities (DH) modules that focus on using, applying or adapting technologies and resources to DH problems. The challenge in such modules is to introduce students with a background in humanities or social sciences to technical content without going into detail. NLP tools often require special input formats, knowledge of programming options, and post-processing of the output. NLP resources are often not easily accessible and provide only limited interaction. Interfaces and search tools require knowledge of specialized search syntax.

The workshop is intended to provide a forum for such “NLP teachers” to share experiences, discuss best practices, introduce teaching concepts, and present demos of existing technology. It also provides an opportunity for DH researchers to express their needs and provide directions for future DH curricular developments. The workshop is intended to foster collaborations and to cross-fertilize knowledge and approaches across DH disciplines.

Teach4DH is co-organized by GSCL's SIG Education and Profession and supported by CLARIN. The workshop is co-located with GSCL 2017.

Click here to visit Teach3DH website.

 

4th Learner Corpus Research Conference
Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, 5-7 October 2017

The 4th Learner Corpus Research Conference – LCR 2017 – will take place from 5-7 October 2017 in Bolzano/Bozen in the northern Italian province of Bolzano, Alto Adige / Bozen, Südtirol. As a multilingual province, Bolzano/Bozen provides perfect surrounding conditions for a conference on learner language. LCR 2017 will be hosted by the Institute for Applied Linguistic of EURAC Research. The theme of LCR 2017 is “Widening the Scope of Learner Corpus Research”. The keynote speakers of LCR 2017 will address the theme in their lectures on L1 writing development and Learner Corpus Research (Philip Durrant), quantitative methods in Learner Corpus Research (Stefan Th. Gries), and Learner Corpus Research and Italian as L2 (Stefania Spina).

For more information and registration details click here.


Workshop "Software Sustainability: Quality and Re-usability"
Berlin, Germany, 9-10 October 2017

Sustainability of its software and services is one of the core technological challenges research infrastructures – not only in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences – are facing. Various efforts are being undertaken to address different aspects of the overall problem. This workshops brings together leading experts from the digital research infrastructures CESSDA, CLARIN and DARIAH in an effort to engage with the wider community. Its purpose is to discuss whether it is possible to combine existing approaches into a set of guides and handbooks to enable developers to ensure software quality from the start and collaboratively with infrastructure providers to create a service that is than usable by end users.

As part of the ESFRI process, the field of digital research infrastructures is being advanced through individual projects. These have worked on Software Maturity Models (CESSDA) and a Service Life Cycle (DARIAH) and created general Software Quality Guidelines (CLARIAH), informing the basis of all development efforts and processes. During the workshop, we will be introduced to these concepts and the problems they address. On the second day, we will spread into group sessions to discuss possible connections between them as well as the missing links.

The workshop is open to anyone interested in software quality and sustainability. We strongly invite experienced developers and project managers to participate, as well as anyone identifying with the spectrum in between. Collaboratively we hope to align existing efforts with your needs and requirements to shape a common catalogue of rules and criteria applicable to many infrastructures and research initiatives.

The workshop is a joint effort by DARIAH-DE and DARIAH-EU within the DESIR project.

For further information and registration details please click here.


Natural Language Processing at Science in a Digital World
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 12 October 2017

Discover how digital technology impacts scientific practice!

Our understanding of human behavior and the brain, dealing with the challenges of climate change and discovering new energy sources, analyzing social and cultural interaction, processing sensor data from billions of devices from transportation to health - digital technology cuts through all scientific disciplines.
At this one-day national e-Science symposium, we will discuss in different thematic sessions what this means for scientific research. From the humanities to physics and beyond. The symposium will feature two plenary keynotes and five thematic sessions showcasing world-class data-driven and compute-intensive research in different fields. Our Executive Director, Francisca de Jong will be among the speakers for the special thematic session on Natural Language Processing.

More information can be found here. 

 

Call for Contributions to the 4th Digital Humanities Austria Conference
Innsbruck, Austria, 4-6 December 2017

The Research Center Digital Humanities at the University of Innsbruck, the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, CLARIN and DARIAH invite you to submit proposals for the 4th Digital Humanities Austria Conference that takes place in Innsbruck on 4-6 December 2017.

The programme committee welcomes proposals in all areas of Digital Humanities research and related fields that work with digital methods, resources and data.
Special attention will be given to the conference theme: Data First!?
The digital turn is increasing the interest for data among the humanities. Data will be produced almost automatically regarding to methods like text recognition and text mining. On the one hand, the work with data offers new challenges for humanities scholars according to its quantity and its quality. On the other hand, it reveals unknown and exciting insights and analysis. Submissions according to this topic will be given preference.
Proposals can be submitted for paper presentations, panels, workshops, posters and demonstrations (for the "Tools Gallery").
Abstracts that will be uploaded at Conftool are considered as proposals.
Closing Date for submissions: 15 August 2017.

Detailed information can be found here

 

CLIN 28: Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands - First Call for Abstracts
Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 26 January 2018

The 28th Meeting of Computational Linguistics in The Netherlands (CLIN 28) will be organised by the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University. CLIN 28 will take place in Nijmegen, The Netherlands on January 26, 2018.

Researchers are invited to submit, in English, abstracts describing work on all aspects of computational linguistics and related language and speech technologies and applications.

Submissions should include:

  • Name, affiliation and contact details of each author

  • Presentation title

  • An abstract in PDF of 500 words maximum (excluding references), outlining their presentation

  • A stated preference for oral presentation or poster

Presentation abstracts should be submitted electronically, no later than November 3rd, 2017 (12PM, GMT/UTC + 01:00 hour) via the submission website at EasyChair.

Since CLIN 20, a special annual thesis prize, sponsored by STIL, is awarded to the best Masters thesis in computational linguistics. STIL is the Stichting Toepassing Inductieve Leertechnieken. Masters theses submitted to and evaluated at a university or organization of higher education in the Netherlands or Flanders are eligible for the prize. The thesis should address a topic in computational linguistics or its applications, and may be written in Dutch or English.

Click here for more information.

 

Call for Proposals KB Researcher-in-Residence Program 2018

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of the Netherlands is seeking proposals for its Researcher-in-residence program to start in 2018. This program offers a unique chance to early career researchers to work in the library with the Digital Humanities team and KB data. In return, we learn how researchers use the data of the KB.

This year we invite academic researchers with a background in Humanities, Social Sciences, Computer Science or Artificial Intelligence to apply for one of the two following tracks:

  1. an 'open track’ in which we will address your Humanities or Social Sciences research question in a 6 month project using the digital collections of the KB and computational techniques.

  2. An ‘information extraction track’ in which we invite Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence as well as Social Sciences and Humanities scholars to use or collaborate in our ongoing research on extracting structured data from our extensive collections of unstructured text.

For both tracks you will be assisted by one of our research software engineers. The output of the project will be incorporated in the experimental platform of the KB, the KB Lab, and should ideally be beneficial for the larger scholarly community.

Read full call text.


Call for Papers: Special Issue on Web Semantics for Digital Humanities
Special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics

Digital humanities is a new and emerging field, which brings together humanities scholars, social scientists and computer and information scientists to work on agendas of both fundamental and applied research. The field combines digital semantic technologies and (big) digital heritage data. Digital humanities research is typically driven by core questions in each of these disciplines: on the one hand, semantic technologies are applied in novel ways in addressing research questions of humanities and social sciences; on the other hand, these areas stimulate the development of novel methods in computer and information sciences.

For this special issue the Journal of Web Semantics is calling for the submission of novel and impactful research results demonstrating the design, development, evaluation and use of research methods and infrastructures based on Semantic Web technologies for cultural heritage data and use cases in digital humanities scholarship. The submission deadline is 2 October 2017.

Read the call for papers  


Call for Contributions to a Special Issue of the LRE Journal: "Language Technology for Digital Humanities"
Language Technology for Digital Humanities

Submissions are invited for papers to a special issue of the journal Language Resources and Evaluation. The special issue will focus on the use of language technology for digital humanities and will have the title "Language Technology for Digital Humanities’.

The editors would be delighted to receive submissions from the CLARIN community. Please consider contributing to this special issue and encourage colleagues to do so as well.

The submission deadline is 31 October 2017.

Read the complete call
 


JOB OPENINGS


Postdoctoral Position in Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities
University of Copenhagen (UCPH), Denmark

The Department of Nordic Research, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen (UCPH), Denmark, invites applications for a 2-year postdoctoral position in Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities to be filled by 1 November 2017 or as soon as possible thereafter. The successful candidate will be attached to the Centre for Language Technology (CST) and will work for the cross-departmental and interdisciplinary research project Skrift og tekst i tid og rum (Script and text in time and space) funded by the Velux Foundation.

The successful candidate will engage in cutting-edge research in the area of Digital Humanities. In particular, the candidate will contribute to the development of language technology tools for the lemmatization and morphosyntactic analysis of medieval texts from Denmark, both in Danish and Latin. Furthermore s/he will engage in the application of machine learning to the task of automatic dating and localization of the same texts using existing linguistic annotations as well as visual features. The candidate will work in close collaboration not only with computational linguists from CST, but also with experts in manuscript studies and philology (including digital philology).

More detail on the project and how to apply for the position can be found here

The application deadline is 23.59 CEST, 1 September 2017.