Digisam
Digisam is the national secretariat for coordination of the digital cultural heritage. It is situated at the National Archives but maintains a close connection to 24 national authorities in the cultural heritage sector.
Our mission is twofold: to provide the government with suggestions for a suitable, high-quality infrastructure for cultural heritage information, and to provide continuous support and guidance to the involved institutions and encourage cooperation in the fields of digitisation of, digital access to and digital preservation of the cultural heritage.
The 24 authorities that take part in Digisam hold large amounts of printed as well as previously unpublished texts, including works of fiction, letters and diaries, school essays, interviews and scientific texts. There is not any comprehensive overview of this material, however. To launch our work within Swe-Clarin, we organised a seminar about cultural heritage texts in early March, which gathered thirty-odd representatives with archival, library, database and research interests within the area. The seminar housed discussions on rights issues, involving ALIS (Administration of Literary Rights in Sweden), but also – and more enthusiastically – the new research possibilities that arise from language technology.
For more information, visit (only in Swedish): http://www.digisam.se/index.ph p/hem/entry/en-spaeckad-dag-om-kulturarvets-texter
Many institutions also hold sound and video recordings that may be relevant to language technological analysis. Last year, Digisam and the National Library led a group that focused in particular on AV material at the cultural heritage institutions. The rapid digital turn means that we face a particular set of challenges as many information carriers will soon be unreadable and rich sources of information risk being lost forever. Digisam is planning to cooperate with the K centres at The Language Council/ISOF and TMH/KTH in carrying out an inventory of sound resources at our partner authorities and to support the work on a pilot study where (a selection of) ISOF sound recordings will be made available for research.
Within Swe-Clarin, Digisam will initially attempt to disseminate knowledge about the organisation and its activities, primarily to the 24 cooperating authorities but also to other organisations within the broad field of cultural heritage. The participants at the seminar about cultural heritage texts expressed an interest in further seminars and researcher workshops, as well as good examples of concrete projects, and in particular figures, i.e. cost/benefit analyses that would support reprioritisation of internal work. We will try to meet these requirements and are looking forward to a continued dialogue and many more meetings in the future!
Swe-Clarin i Lund
At the kick-off, Swe-Clarin’s national coordination team proposed visiting all partners in Sweden to get a better impression of what is out there, as well as to strengthen relations between the Swe-Clarin partners. The idea was appreciated and on 11 March the tour began with a trip to Lund, where Lars, Nina, Stefan, and Caspar were given a guided tour of the HumLab by Johan Frid, Marianne Gullberg, and Jens Larsson.
The visit began in HumLab’s premises, in the basement of the Centre for Languages and Literature in Lund. This is where HumLab keeps its technical equipment and we were given demonstrations of eye-tracking technology, articulographs, EEG equipment, and the silent room (see photo). There was also a presentation of HumLab’s digital resources, including DialektResa, with recordings of Swedish dialects; a text-tospeech tool with user-defined orthographic rules; ScriptLog, which logs everything that happens on a keyboard and which can also visualise eye-tracking data; and HumLab’s IMDI server for languagerelated data. The visit concluded with a lively discussion about Swe-Clarin.
Swe-Clarin’s First HSS Workshop
he 17 April Swe-Clarin will host its first workshop for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). The aims of Swe-Clarin is to build tools and resources to support digital research within the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our definition of HSS is rather broad and we welcome all who work or want to work with digital, linguistic tools in their research within the Humanities, Social Sciences, Law, Medicine etc. The workshop will be held in Swedish. The programme can be found in the right-hand column.
Time and venue:
17 April, 13-19
Lennart Torstenssonsgatan 6, room K333, Gothenburg Registration: http://goo.gl/forms/tuchRuyjD9
For more information, see http://sweclarin.se
Calendar
17 April: HSS Workshop in Gothenburg. Everybody is welcome.
9-10 June: Nordic Clarin Network Workshop.
5-6 October: Nordic Clarin Network Workshop in connection to the Language Bank’s autumn workshop on historical resources.
19-20 November: Swe-Clarin general meeting in Stockholm, Swe-Clarin Workshop enclosed Friday afternoon. Everybody is welcome.
Preliminary Workshop Program 17/4
13:00 - 15:00 Session 1: Ongoing projects
- Introduction
- Jonas Lindström – Language Technology and Historical Texts
- Linn Sandberg – Election Research on Twitter
- Leif-Jöran Olsson – The Drama Web
- Nina Tahmasebi – Relations, Coordinations and Rhetoric
15:00 - 15:30 Coffee
15:30 - 16:10 Session 2: Upcoming Material
- Material at the Language Bank
- Jonas Engman – Questionnaires at Nordiska muséet
16:10 - 17:30 Discussion
17:30 - 19:00 Drinks reception
Partners
Swe-Clarin has nine partners from Lund, Gothenburg, Linköping, Stockholm and Uppsala, both in universities and public authorities. A list and description of all partners may be found here: http://sweclarin.se/swe/centrum
News
We will not go on spamming you. Should you want more info on Swe-Clarin, please sign up for the news list here: http://lists.sweclarin.se/mailman/listinfo/news_lists.sweclarin.se