Swe-Clarin : Language Resources and Technology for Digital Humanities

CLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), which aims at (a) making extensive language-based materials available as primary research data to the humanities and social sciences (HSS); and (b) offering state-of-the-art language technology (LT) as an eresearch tool for this purpose, positioning CLARIN centrally in what is often referred to as the digital humanities (DH). The Swedish CLARIN node Swe-Clarin was established in 2015 with funding from the Swedish Research Council. In this paper, we describe the composition and activities of Swe-Clarin, aiming at meeting the requirements of all HSS and other researchers whose research involves using text and speech as primary research data, and spreading the awareness of what Swe-Clarin can offer these research communities. We focus on one of the central means for doing this: pilot projects conducted in collaboration between HSS researchers and Swe-Clarin, together formulating a research question, the addressing of which requires working with large language-based materials. Four such pilot projects are described in more detail, illustrating research on rhetorical history, second-language acquisition, literature, and political science. A common thread to these projects is an aspiration to meet the challenge of conducting research on the basis of very large amounts of textual data in a consistent way without losing sight of the individual cases making up the mass of data, i.e., to be able to move between Moretti’s “distant” and “close reading” modes. While the pilot projects clearly make substantial contributions to DH, they also reveal some needs for more development, and in particular a need for document-level access to the text materials. As a consequence of this, work has now been initiated in Swe-Clarin to meet this need, so that Swe-Clarin together with HSS scholars investigating intricate research questions can take on the methodological challenges of big-data language-based digital humanities