The below is cross-posted from the Talk of Europe blog.
In 2014-2015 the Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), VU University Amsterdam (VUA), DANS and Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV) will collaborate on the Talk of Europe – Travelling CLARIN Campus (ToE-TCC) project. This project, an initiative of CLARIN ERIC and CLARIN-NL made possible by NWO and OCW support, is a follow-up on the PoliMedia project in which these partners collaborated previously.
ToE-TCC has three ambitions. The first is to translate the proceedings of the European Parliament debates (europarl) to CLARIN standards. In other words, the europarl data is curated to linked data so that it can be linked to and reused by other datasets and services. An interesting aspect of this dataset is that its available in 21 languages, enabling to link to other datasets in as many different languages. This first aim of the project will be undertaken mainly by Laura Hollink and Astrid van Aggelen from the Knowledge Representation & Reasoning group from the VUA. This dataset will be archived and made available at DANS, coordinated by Marnix van Berchum.
The second ambition is to research how this linked data can be exploited to be used by humanities scholars. The combination of linked datasets with the base available in 21 languages should allow research questions not yet feasible. As such, interlingual comparative research through digital tools becomes possible. In comparison, where PoliMedia focused on how Dutch debates were covered in the Dutch media, the europarl data could be analysed to compare how European Parliament debates are covered in Dutch versus Polish media. Political scientists could analyse how subjects from EP debates relate to subjects in debates of national parliaments. In order to build tools helpful, we will investigate user requirements and possible research questions from humanities scholars. This second aim will be undertaken by Max Kemman, Martijn Kleppe and Henri Beunders from the History department of EUR.
The third ambition is to spark a transnational, European collaboration to create tools for scholars to analyse linked datasets. To this end, three meetings of a week will be organised in which teams from all CLARIN countries are invited to participate. Think hackathon, but a week long and with a European focus. The organisation of these hackweeks is undertaken by Max Kemman of EUR and CLARIN ERIC. The first hackweek will be organized by Johan Oomen of NISV.
Project coordination is handled by Max Kemman (EUR), who will also be the contact person of the project. This website will be updated regularly to disseminate project progress, results and information about the ToE-TCC hackweeks. To stay up-to-date, please subscribe to the RSS-feed here or the mailinglist here.
(Unfortunately, Martijn Kleppe and Johan Oomen were not present to join the group pic.)