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Sessions were conducted in four language groups (Dutch, English, German and Italian) and comprised 5-6 people (linguists, oral historians, social scientists and digital humanities scholars) a formal group evaluation followed each session.
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It was useful to have human language technologists sitting amongst the scholars, witnessing first-hand some of the really basic challenges in getting started. This could turn out to be a significant barrier to the use of open source tools that often require a bit more familiarity with, say, laptop operating systems.
#Under scrutiny software
Some participants struggled to download software which suggested a lack of basic technical proficiency. (VOYANT, Stanford NLPCore, TXM and Praat). These were applied to text and audio-visual sources, with the intent of detecting language and speech features by looking at concordances and correlations, processing syntactic tree structures, searching for named entities, emotion recognition, etc. These ranged from annotation of digital sources (ELAN and NVivo) to linguistic identification and information extraction tools.
#Under scrutiny install
In our München workshop, we devoted 2 days to our participants’ experimenting with four tools for semantic annotation and linguistic interpretation tools, building on the homework we had asked them to do, i.e.to install and become familiar with 5 tools.
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In München we had the opportunity for ‘the proof of the pudding’, testing the prototype of the T-Chain, known as the OH Portal, with data that had been pre-selected and prepared by the workshop organisers and sessions leaders.
#Under scrutiny series
The reasons why CLARIN can make a difference in the world of oral history is explained in a series of short multilingual videoclips with speech technologist Henk van de Heuvel, linguist Silvia Calamai, and data curator Louise Corti.Īrezzo yielded a roadmap for the development of a Transcription Chain (T-Chain), in which various open source tools are combined to support transcription and alignment of audio (oral) and text (written) in various languages. In Arezzo in 2017, the first challenge was taken up, applying speech recognition software to Italian, German, Dutch and English oral history data and evaluating the experiences of scholars. Also the website was set up to cross-disciplinary communicate work from this group. One of CLARIN’s objectives is to reach out to social science and humanities scholars in order to assess how the CLARIN assets can be taken up by other disciplines than (computational) linguistics and language technology.Īt the first two workshops in Oxford (2016) and Utrecht (2016), we assessed what the potential could be of bringing together state of the art speech technology, descriptive and analytical tools for linguistic analysis and oral history data, to open up massive amounts of interview data and analyse them in new, often unexpected ways. This was the fourth workshop supported by CLARIN ERIC, a European Research Infrastructure Consortium for Language Resources and Technology, offering a digital infrastructure that gives access to text and speech corpora and language technology tools for humanity scholars. The idea is that as the use of language and speech is a common practice in all these scholarly fields, the use of a digital tool that is already mainstream in a parallel discipline, could open up new perspectives and approaches for searching, finding, selecting, processing and interpreting data. This year, the Bavarian stronghold hosted another cheerful gathering of a dedicated community: a CLARIN multidisciplinary workshop in which scholars in the fields of speech technology, social sciences, human computer interaction, oral history and linguistics engaged with each others’ methods and digital tools. Heading to München at the end September offers the spectacle of cheerful Germans wearing dirndls and lederhosen, celebrating their Oktoberfest with remarkable enthusiasm and tons of good beer. Blog post by Stef Scagliola, Louise Corti.