Many of you will, I hope, will have heard of the CLARIN European
Research Infrastructure Consortium for digital language resources
and tools. The consortium is made up of countries, and the UK has
been an Observer for six years. The AHRC is now considering whether
to push for full membership. You can read more about CLARIN and what
full membership means on the CLARIN-UK website here:
https://www.clarin.ac.uk/, in particular in the recent blog posts.
In short, full membership of CLARIN would give us opportunities for
access to corpus resources and research collaborations in the domain
of modern languages and linguistics.
The AHRC are asking us for some fairly detailed and concrete
information with a deadline of 10th February, so that they can
consider whether to consider to push for full membership for the UK,
and have asked for responses to the following questions:
- What does observer membership currently allow the UK and its
researchers to do? Can you give any specific examples of
activity that would not have been possible without CLARIN
membership?
- What would full membership allow the UK and its researchers to
do that it/they cannot already?
- What would be the likely impact for the UK and its
researchers, should we withdraw completely from CLARIN?
If any of you can offer any evidence in respect of these questions,
then I would be most grateful. If, for example, you rely in your
teaching or research on any resources provided by or funded by
CLARIN, then please let me know. This could include any of the
resources listed here for example: https://www.clarin.eu/content/easy-access-protected-resources.
CLARIN is particularly important when it comes to digital resources
in Germanic languages, but is by no means limited to them. Please
feel free to forward this request to others! Other suggestions about
how to support this process are also welcome. Any comments or
questions? Please send them to me!
Best wishes,
Martin
--
Electronic Enlightenment & Oxford Text Archive,
Bodleian Libraries,
University of Oxford
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