I am writing with the latest news about exciting new developments 
regarding an emerging network of UK scholars who are interested in 
building better facilities for sharing and using electronic language 
resources.

Preliminary discussions have led to a strong feeling that it would be 
good to start with an informal network, whose activities include:
- helping to start and sustain collaborative projects to promote the 
sharing and use of language resources;
- lobbying funders for support for building sustainable services for 
work with corpora, lexicons and other digital resources and tools;
- getting involved with the ENROLLER project 
(http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/stella/enroller/) as an exemplar of 
what is possible with the latest technologies and shared services; there 
are opportunities to test the portal and feed in your suggestions and 
requirement;
- engaging with the CLARIN infrastructure to ensure that UK researchers 
have the opportunity to get involved with the latest developments at the 
European level, in the absence of any leadership from UK funders or 
policy-makers;
- a one-day workshop "How to make your language resources discoverable" 
in Oxford in May (details to be finalised soon) as part of the 
JISC-funded 'Discovering Babel' project;
- promoting collaboration between relevant disciplines (e.g. English, 
Modern Languages, Linguistics, Computer Science, History, etc.)
- exploring imaginative options for funding the network activities.

The idea to submit a proposal to a research council to support a network 
is currently on hold, following discouraging feedback from informal 
approaches. This highlights the need for a lobby group!

You are currently subscribed to the CLARIN-UK email list. You are on 
this list because you have expressed an interest at some point in the 
networking activities in the UK around CLARIN and other research 
infrastructures for using digital language resources.

Please accept my apologies if you did not want to be on the list. You 
can unsubscribe or adjust your list settings by following the normal 
procedures at JISCMAIL lists (see http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk) or by 
dropping me a line. Also, please invite other people to join the list by 
signing themselves up or getting in touch with me.

To start the discussion on this list, please share your thoughts about 
potential network activities. Note also, that there is a suggestion that 
we name the network "Cornet", or maybe "CorNet" (from "corpus network"). 
The email list could be renamed accordingly. Feedback and ideas are welcome!

Best wishes,
Martin

-- 
Martin Wynne
Research Technologies Service&
Oxford e-Research Centre&
Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics

Oxford University Computing Services
7-19 Banbury Road
Oxford
UK - OX2 6NN
Tel: +44 1865 283299 or +44 1865 610677
Fax: +44 1865 273275
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