The CLARIN-D centre “Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals” (BAS) in Munich applied for a Google Research Credit Grant and was honoured with the award. From now on, a greater amount of processing power for the automatic transcription of audio-visual speech data will be made available for the users. We congratulate Florian Schiel and his colleagues at the BAS on being awarded the Google research prize, which includes a prize money of 5,000 dollars. The funding started on January 1st, 2020.

What are Google Research Credit Grants?

The US-based technology company Google has got a large division called “Google Cloud Processing” (GCP), which offers several KI-applications as (fee-based) web services. In this division, the programme “GCP Education” is located. This programme allows students to apply for so-called “credits”, which can be used for GCP applications. Researchers, too, can apply for small grants (so-called “research credits”) with their project proposal. There is no application deadline, as applications can be handed in on a running basis. Further information on the application process can be found here: https://edu.google.com/programs/credits/faqs/?modal_active=none#research-credits 

Usage Scenarios of Google Services at the BAS

The BAS WebServices use, among other things, the Google Cloud Automatic Speech Recognition for the fully-automated annotation of audio-visual data (cf. services “ASR” and “Pipeline”). To provide their users with more processing power in this field, Florian Schiel applied for a Google “research credit grant”. He decided to put a thematic focus on the development of the BAS WebServices and the integration of Google Cloud applications.

BAS users benefit from the award

Since the awarding on January 1st, 2020, users of the BAS WebServices have been able to use about 1,7 million seconds of automatic transcription each

The closing event of the CLARIN-D working groups (WGs) took place on November 14th, 2019, in the “Neue Aula” of the University of Tübingen. More than 20 participants came together in the representative rooms of the university in order to have a final discussion about the WGs’ long-lasting participation in CLARIN-D: Since the start of the project, CLARIN-D has cooperated closely with researchers from various disciplines, and for that reason it has always been of great importance for the project to include the input from the working groups. They have served as initiators in the communities and have, for instance, drawn up curation projects. Among the guests of the closing event, one could find the leaders of the WGs, their staff as well as former members, the representative of the funding organisation, Dr. Maria Böhme (DLR), and the leaders of the CLARIN-D centres. The event was looking both ways, offering a retrospective on the work of the WGs with the possibility of future collaborations in other contexts: The WGs’ work is highly relevant as well as community driven and the needs of the users are growing steadily, so that they will in all likelihood be continued elsewhere and with a new label. 

After Thorsten Trippel (WG 6, Tübingen) had welcomed the participants, members of the WGs offered their perspective on the past and the future of the WGs in four different talks: Cathleen Kantner, leader of WG 7 (Social Science), spoke about the characteristics of infrastructures in general and, in the following, about the establishment of research infrastructures in the digital humanities in the context of highly innovative research projects. She emphasized that such developments included current research

Text by Charlotte Hartungen.

What started as a five days conference with four workshops in 2009, celebrated the 10^th anniversary this year. We are talking about the European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture and Technology” (ESU) at the University of Leipzig.

You can summarize the ESU with some numbers and data. During the eleven days the ESU took place (23.07.-02-08.2019), 92 students, young scholars, researchers, members of different Universities and others interested in the large field of the Digital Humanities came to Leipzig to join one of the eleven workshops offered this year. Of the eleven workshops, four were supported by CLARIN ERIC and offered by experts from the CLARIN-D environment.
These were, namely, Andreas Witt who offered the workshop ‘Compilation, Annotation and Analysis of Written Text Corpora. Introduction to Methods and Tools’, Bernhard Fisseni who offered the workshop ‘Searching Linguistic Patterns in Text Corpora for Digital Humanities Research’, Christoph Draxler who offered the workshop ‘All About Data – Exploratory Data Modelling and Practical Database Access’, and Janos Borst and Felix Helfer who offered the workshop ‘An Introduction to Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing - Applications and Implementation’.

The participants from over 30 countries who could apply for six different scholarships had to choose one or two workshops consisting of a total of 18 sessions or 36 teaching hours. In addition to workshops, 14 posters presentations and 12 project presentations were offered by the participants themselves. This was an opportunity for students and young scholars to present their research in a scientific setting and to get feedback and tips through the presence of experts.

The ESU is also always