AP3: Designing resources and applications with regard to users from humanities subjects

Participating partners: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften Berlin, University of Frankfurt, University of Gießen

The following tasks should be accomplished::

1. Support of projects in the field of humanities, that work with language resources of all kinds, with the help of the infrastructure that will be developed by CLARIN and D-SPIN. We can refer to two prototypical resource based applications in humanities that we find exceptionally interesting: (1) Computer Assisted Language Learning and (2) the BABEL project, funded by the ESF and DFG, which is built upon enormous resources about endangered languages. Both examples are relevant both on a European and a national level. Furthermore, BBAW and the University of Leipzig are going to incorporate projects in humanities. These applications are ground breaking on a national level for CLARIN and are therefore a relevant contribution from Germany for CLARIN..
2. Determining the demand for language resources and the needs for accessing these resources for typical representatives and user of humanities. These demands are going to influence the future development of the infrastructure. The cooperation with other projects, initiatives and committees that develop an electronic infrastructure for research in humanities, will be organised. This project will develop contacts to other projects and initiatives, that head towards an electronic support of research in humanities. Synergistic effects should be used and parallel, non coordinated developments should be avoided. The collaboration with the Text-Grid project is of special interest. These demands are going to influence any future development of the infrastructure.

The partner in charge, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, will establish and maintain the connection and networking with other language resource oriented initiatives in the field of humanities on a national and international level. The BBAW is responsible for the development and description of the demand for language resources of users in humanities and for ways to use them. Both other partners are going to do the preliminary work.

The University of Gießen will elaborate the case study for Computer-Assisted Language Learning with regard to language resources and the use of it in use-oriented work flows.

The University of Frankfurt will generate procedures that shall include the project BABEL with regard to connecting already existing and newly developed language resources, enabling the use of user-oriented work flows.