CLARIN-D Blog

Successful closing event of the CLARIN-D Working Groups: Time to say goodbye - or is it?

The closing event of the CLARIN-D working groups (WGs) took place on November 14th, 2019, in the “Neue Aula” of the University of Tübingen. More than 20 participants came together in the representative rooms of the university in order to have a final discussion about the WGs’ long-lasting participation in CLARIN-D: Since the start of the project, CLARIN-D has cooperated closely with researchers from various disciplines, and for that reason it has always been of great importance for the project to include the input from the working groups. They have served as initiators in the communities and have, for instance, drawn up curation projects. Among the guests of the closing event, one could find the leaders of the WGs, their staff as well as former members, the representative of the funding organisation, Dr. Maria Böhme (DLR), and the leaders of the CLARIN-D centres. The event was looking both ways, offering a retrospective on the work of the WGs with the possibility of future collaborations in other contexts: The WGs’ work is highly relevant as well as community driven and the needs of the users are growing steadily, so that they will in all likelihood be continued elsewhere and with a new label. 

After Thorsten Trippel (WG 6, Tübingen) had welcomed the participants, members of the WGs offered their perspective on the past and the future of the WGs in four different talks: Cathleen Kantner, leader of WG 7 (Social Science), spoke about the characteristics of infrastructures in general and, in the following, about the establishment of research infrastructures in the digital humanities in the context of highly innovative research projects. She emphasized that such developments included current research

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A ten-year success story

Text by Charlotte Hartungen.

What started as a five days conference with four workshops in 2009, celebrated the 10th anniversary this year. We are talking about the European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture and Technology” (ESU) at the University of Leipzig.

You can summarize the ESU with some numbers and data. During the eleven days the ESU took place (23.07.-02-08.2019), 92 students, young scholars, researchers, members of different Universities and others interested in the large field of the Digital Humanities came to Leipzig to join one of the eleven workshops offered this year. Of the eleven workshops, four were supported by CLARIN ERIC and offered by experts from the CLARIN-D environment.
These were, namely, Andreas Witt who offered the workshop ‘Compilation, Annotation and Analysis of Written Text Corpora. Introduction to Methods and Tools’, Bernhard Fisseni who offered the workshop ‘Searching Linguistic Patterns in Text Corpora for Digital Humanities Research’, Christoph Draxler who offered the workshop ‘All About Data – Exploratory Data Modelling and Practical Database Access’, and Janos Borst and Felix Helfer who offered the workshop ‘An Introduction to Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing - Applications and Implementation’.

The participants from over 30 countries who could apply for six different scholarships had to choose one or two workshops consisting of a total of 18 sessions or 36 teaching hours. In addition to workshops, 14 posters presentations and 12 project presentations were offered by the participants themselves. This was an opportunity for students and young scholars to present their research in a scientific setting and to get feedback and tips through the presence of experts.

The ESU is also always

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