CIRSS Seminar: Andreas Witt

Andreas Witt, iSchool Research Fellow and Director of the Research Infrastructure Division at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, will present, "CLARIN - A Research Infrastructure for Language Data."

Abstract: Across many areas of science, current research efforts require digital data for analysis, archiving, sharing, and re-use by humans and machines. To address this need, in 2002, the European Union established the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) as "a strategic instrument to develop the scientific integration of Europe and to strengthen its international outreach." Since then several Europe-wide infrastructures have been established, among them are two consortia devoted to the Digital Humanities. These are "DARIAH - Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities" and "CLARIN - Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure." In this talk, I present the development of CLARIN from a technical as well as an organizational perspective. Special attention will be paid to the role of standards for language resources and to legal issues within large scale research infrastructures. 

CLARIN focuses on digital language data for scholarly use in the social sciences and humanities. CLARIN offers tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyze and combine data sets from different sources, e.g., digital linguistic resources stored at different locations. This is enabled through the creation of a federation of centers of different kind, e.g., knowledge centers and language data repositories. 

The CLARIN infrastructure is fully operational in many countries, and a large number of participating centers are offering access services to data, tools and expertise. At the same time, CLARIN continues to get implemented in some countries that joined these infrastructure initiatives more recently. Today, CLARIN is no longer restricted to partners from Europe: as a first CLARIN site in the U.S.A., the TalkBank center at Carnegie Mellon University became a CLARIN center.