digiTAAL

Some exciting examples

Ineke Schuurmancoordinator CLARIN-Vlaanderen

Digital Humanities

• Language as object of research• Language as means for research

• Modern languages• Old languages

• Written, audio, video (collections of) documents

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Treebanks

Available for most ‘modern’ languages

But also possible for ‘dead’ languages like Latin, Ancient Greek

http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/syntax/treebank/getinvolved.html

Index Thomisticus Treebank, Milanohttp://itreebank.marginalia.it/

Full query language needed

More treebanks

• Medieval Portuguese treebank– Under construction

• In the near future: INPOLDER (CLARIN NL)

A parser, not yet a corpus, BUT:

through web interface raw older Dutch text can be entered, and parsed text (syntactically analysed) will be returned

– Uncorrected, but manual correction is possible

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Visualization

Gabmap: doing dialect analysis on the web

ADEPT-project (CLARIN-NL)

Dialects (examples Netherlands/Flanders + USA)

www.gabmap.nl, including tutorial, manual, video, FAQ, …

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Pronunciation distance

Gabmap: doing dialect analysis on the web

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Dendrogram

Gabmap: doing dialect analysis on the web

Audio

CLARIN pilot (NL/FL) TTNWW, audio partTAAL2SPRAAK (CLARIN-Vlaanderen)

Audio as a means to enlarge accessibility of larger collections of data (tapes)

Transcription, even if not 100% correct, is very helpful in finding what you are looking for, especially if synchronized with time

(useful for psychology, sociology, history)

Audio and older texts

• Digitization of old texts still problematic (cf DigiHIST)

Experiment: Read medieval text aloud and have it automatically transcribed(not trained, modern language model used)

Audio Leuvense Schepenbank

• http://www.ccl.kuleuven.be/CLARIN/SAL8130_0093_inge_moris.hardsubs.mp4

• http://www.ccl.kuleuven.be/CLARIN/SAL8130_0093_inge_moris_4gr.pdf

Raw material !!

Written part TTNWW

• Relate documents, make texts more accessible by making explicit data that are not expressed as suchParis formulated objections, London/John didn’t

What is a name, what kind of name is it?• Analysis of names in fiction• Sagalassos project (archaeology): temporal

and geospatial analysisweb service, end of 2012

Some more examples

• When is ‘now’? And where?

Stylometry

Stylene (CLARIN-Vlaanderen)– UAntwerpen/Univ.College Gent

• Is text as a whole written by same person?

• Show development in style of a specific author

• Is a text clear? Is it really understandable by , say, children age 10-12?

Web service (autumn 2012)

‘stylometry’ as means

• Is thesis X written by student or by ‘Wikipedia’

Reliability

• Can text X be written by a 10 year old girl

paedophily

Reusability of data

• For same kind of research

• For completely other kind of research

Both should be encouraged

• time and money

To be taken into account: IPR !

Veterans project

• Interviews veterans Dutch military actions (1940-2010)

• 1000 interviews (2.5 h), semi-structured

Original: social and military historiansWho else can use this archive ?First: reluctance

Veterans 2

People from divers disciplines invited to write paper: theology, psychology, discourse analysis, anthropology, sociology,..)

Turned out to be a very valuable corpus!

Digital Humanities aspect: several tools were made available to facilitate research in different disciplines, tools to give access to spoken content

“Circulation of Knowledge”

“Geleerdenbrievenproject” (Letters of scientists)

17th century: Grotius (Hugo de Groot), Constantijn Huygens, Christiaan Huygens, Descartes, …

20.000 letters, mainly Dutch, French, Latin

Intended for “history of science”, of course also relevant for other disciplines

Polish example: Sejm

• Polish parliament, 1918 – now

• Texts, records, video

Goal: all kinds of linguistic research

• But of course: wealth of information for other disciplines as well

Conclusions

• Several ‘easy-to-use’ research possibilities are (or will soon be) available

• Others are still more complex, but do offer possibilities for new kinds of projects (or easier ways of doing research)

• Lots of material could be used by third parties as well: do not keep stuff “in your drawer”

• Students and (young) researchers should be made aware of new possibilities

• Sound Registers (1739-1799)

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