Humlab

– Umeå university

Humlab at Umeå University is a unit at the Faculty of Humanities, whose mission is "to initiate, inspire and develop the relationship between the humanities, culture and information technology". Its mission is to study mankind and its cultural expressions – in relation to ongoing digitization of society, and also to use digital methods and tools to study questions related to a humanistic research tradition.

Humlab has four focus areas. These are: digital practices, digital pedagogy, digital art, and method and tool development. Within each area, Humlab conducts a number of research and teaching projects, spread across different academic disciplines, such as linguistics, media and communication, history, history of ideas, Sami studies, and archeology.

The Swe-Clarin infrastructure is included within the area of method and tool development, in that it provides an infrastructure for new research projects. Humlab's node within Swe-Clarin (Humlab DigiTal) also connects to the already extensive text analytically oriented work in Humlab.

Humlab DigiTal aims to become an infrastructural resource that supports effective linguistic processing of recorded speech. The infrastructure will to strengthen local and national research collaborations by supporting basic workflows in linguistic research with spoken source material, such as multitier markup of audio materials, extracting subsets of data, acoustic analyses, as well as blinded and randomized perceptual testing and assessment, in an environment that is safe even for sensitive recorded materials. Initially, our focus is therefore on technically supporting the processing of Sami material as well as materials that require special legal considerations in accordance with the Data Protection Regulation.

We also support the publication of developed models as containerized web applications for use within the Clarin network and other actors, as well as public versions of developed corpora.

Contact

Fredrik Karlsson, fredrik.k.karlsson@umu.se