Hi Martin
Just to let you know that I will be attending the meeting on September 4th.
Best wishes
Hilary

-----Original Message-----
From: Clarin-UK [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martin Wynne
Sent: 03 July 2014 11:44
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Meeting in Sheffield

Thanks to everyone who got in touch. I would like to propose a meeting in Sheffield at 10-11am on the morning of Thursday September 4th, and everyone is invited. The conference programme is not published at http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/hri/dhc. Delegates can book extra nights' 
accommodation separately at: 
http://withus.group.shef.ac.uk/conferencewithus/bookingpage/. I'll be able to confirm the room for the meeting soon for those who can attend. 
Please let me know if you're coming and pass this message on to anyone who you think might be interested.

I propose the following agenda, and further comments and suggestions are
welcome:

1. Making the pitch to policymakers and funders: what are we asking for and whom do we ask?
2. Who are the other people, centres and departments who we should invite to get involved?
3. Creating a CLARIN-UK portal, a gateway to UK language resources and
tools: what should we include?
4. Next steps

In my opinion, the basic pitch to funders should be that we have lots of excellent resources, tools, and centres of expertise, and lots of research projects with short-term funding. But there is a gap between the research funding schemes and the generic computing and repository services, and many of our research outputs are falling into this gap. 
Once we've created something, who is responsible for distribution and promoting re-use of data, training and supporting users, combination of datasets and tools, sustainability and long-term preservation, managing access and authorization, integration with resources and services in other countries, etc.? Most of our resources are supported on a best-efforts basis by individuals and institutions, and despite many success stories and heroic efforts, we are failing to reach or to satisfy many potential users, and failing to achieve maximum impact with our digital outputs. CLARIN is a European initiative to address these problems, and the UK could benefit from the ongoing large investments in infrastructure in other countries and at the European level, and from future European funding streams available if we were to join the CLARIN consortium.

As a starting point for discussion, one way to proceed would be (i) to form a loose lobby group, asking individuals and organizations to sign up to some basic principles (e.g. the points above), (ii) to create an online portal to highlight language resources, tools, services and events in the UK, as an aid to users and service providers, and to show funders the extent and importance of our offerings, and then (iii) ask for a meeting with funders.

As an initial starting point, I have started map out a list of things to feature in the portal. This would include language resources and tools and services to promote and support them, based primarily in the UK. 
Here's the outline so far:

- online corpus search interfaces (BNCweb, Intellitext, CQPweb, SketchEngine, SCOTS. CLiC, etc.)
- list of tools available under licence (e.g. GATE, NLTK, CLAWS, NACTEM tools, ICECUP, etc.)
- list of resources of UK origin made available in repositories (e.g. 
ELDA, OTA, CHILDES, ELAR, SCOTS, Survey of English Usage, etc.)
- list of key resources not currently made easily available as language resources, but which are of potential use if there was support for granting access to them (e.g. audio archives, orphaned resources)
- training courses, events and other sources of support (e.g. Lancaster summer school & MOOC, Englicious)

Apologies for all of the obvious and important things which I have overlooked or not cited as examples. Please send me more suggestions, and I'll bring a demo portal to show at the meeting. It would be difficult to maintain such a portal and to keep it up to date, but I think that it will be sufficiently useful just in the short term for it to be worth the effort.

Please let me know if you are able to attend the meeting in Sheffield, and any other comments and suggestions are welcome. Please use this email list for points and discussion.

Best wishes,
Martin

--
Martin Wynne
IT Services, University of Oxford
Oxford e-Research Centre
The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics Director of User Involvement, CLARIN ERIC

[log in to unmask]