Swe-Clarin Knowledge Centre for Language and Folklore at the Language Council in Stockholm
The aim of the SWE-CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Language and Folklore is to share knowledge and language resources to researchers in the humanities through the SweClarin infrastructure. The Centre is situated in Stockholm at the Language Council of Sweden. The Language Council is a language planning organization with a mission to monitor and promote the use of languages and language infrastructure in Sweden according to the objectives of the Swedish language policy.
The Language Council is part of the Institute for Language and Folklore, which is a public agency and a research institute. Its mission is to collect, preserve, process and disseminate scientific knowledge and material concerning the Swedish language, the national minority languages, the Swedish sign language and Swedish dialects, as well as other parts of the intangible cultural heritage of Sweden. The Institute’s collections, which document major components of Sweden’s intangible cultural heritage, are open to members of the public, students and researchers
Collections
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The Institute holds the country’s largest collections of folk traditions. The archives contain the results of over a hundred years’ work documenting popular culture: stories of people’s lives – from everyday concerns to high days and holidays, and from the fishing and farming communities of the 19th century to today’s multicultural society.
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The Institute has extensive collections of dialect transcriptions and recordings. There are current work on two dialect dictionaries, a textbook on Swedish dialects, and a database covering the dialects of southern and western Sweden.
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The Institute also has collections of the names used in Sweden from the earliest times to the present day, with information about their meanings, spelling and pronunciation. Databases, registers and dictionaries of personal names and place-names are published.
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The Language Council has large language resources such as Lexin – a series of dictionaries between Swedish and more than 20 other languages used in Sweden.
Working group for speech data
The centre collaborates closely with Digisam and KTH in order to explore how language technology can be used to make digital speech data more accessible for research. The group invites researchers, data owners and technologists to a workshop at KTH on November 6 to start discussing research needs, technological possibilities and cooperation projects (see calender). We hope that the outcome of the workshop will be the beginning of a catalog of tangible examples of new and exciting research in which methods from text and speech technology are utilized to address issues in the human sciences in new ways.
Contact
Director of the SWE-CLARIN Knowledge Centre of Language and Folklore is Rickard Domeij. Expert in language technology is Gunnar Eriksson.
Mail: swe-clarin@sprakochfolkminnen.se
Web site: www.sprakochfolkminnen.se/swe-clarin
The Swe-Clarin tour continued to Uppsala and Stockholm
The coordination team, represented by Lars, Caspar and Stefan, has been to Uppsala and Stockholm to visit some of the Swe-Clarin centres and to participate in a workshop on digitization that was jointly organised by Digisam and the National Library. Two intense days saw discussions on resources and tools, harmonization and certification, and especially possibilities: How can Swe-Clarin become as useful as possible for Swedish researcher within the Humanities and Social Sciences? How can we reach out to them and inform them as effectively as possible? And how can we initiate collaborations in an effective manner? After the two days the coordination team felt it had reached a better understanding of how Uppsala, KTH and Digisam view the work to be done within Swe-Clarin and their places in it. We also had the opportunity to talk to a robot called Furhat, who turned out to have some issues with the word "eight".
The workshop "Digitala vägar in i samlingarna" seemed to be an appreciated event that approached various perspectives on digitization. The audience consisted mainly of library and archive people and the day was concluded by stating that it may be in everybody's interest that an organisation should not try to provide a digital resource as well as develop the tools to use it at the same time.
On October 5-6, the Nordic Clarin Network held a workshop in Gothenburg. The frist day of the workshop was in conjunction with the Språkbanken Autumn workshop The theme was historical resources where both resources and research on the mentioned resources were presented. The workshops generated many interesting discussions and possible collaborations.
Calendar
11 November: SND’s autumn workshop under the theme “New Conditions for Research”.
16 November: Workshop on spoken language: https://sweclarin.se/swe/evenemang/swe-clarin-ochdet-talade-spraket-i-2015
17 November: Swe-Clarin partner meeting in Stockholm.
19–20 November: Meeting of the CLARIN ERIC General Assembly in Copenhagen.
11 December: virtual meeting for the Swe-Clarin partners, 10–12 am.
Future News
If you have information for the newsletter, please send it to the Coordination Team (sam@sweclarin.se).
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