On 2 August 2019 Franciska de Jong, executive director of the SSHOC partner organisation CLARIN ERIC, will give a lecture at the "Culture & Technology" European Summer University in Digital Humanities in Leipzig, Germany. The session, titled "Language as social and cultural data" will present case studies derived from the SSHOC project.

The "Culture & Technology" European Summer University in Digital Humanities

The Summer School "Culture & Technology“ brings together young scholars from the Humanities, Engineering and Information Sciences to foster collaboration and networking across the borders of the individual disciplines. ESU offers a space for the discussion and acquisition of new knowledge, skills and competences in those computer technologies which play a central role in Humanities Computing and which determine every day more and more the work done in the Humanities and Cultural Sciences, as well as in Libraries and Archives everywhere.

The Summer School aims at integrating these activities into the broader context of the Digital Humanities, where questions about the consequences and implications of the application of computational methods and tools to cultural artefacts of all kinds are asked. The Summer School plans to show-case possible realisations of such questions via the presentation of concrete projects.

This year, the 10th European Summer University in Digital Humanities is taking place at the University of Leipzig, Germany, from 23rd of July to 2nd of August 2019.

Language as social and cultural data

The recent surge of data that is available through online platforms has given rise to new research agendas that have an increased potential for comparative research of cultural and societal phenomena across the boundaries of languages and modalities. These agendas come with a demand for the renewal of methodological frameworks and new models of multidisciplinary collaboration.

Based on a number of case studies, partly derived from the H2020 cluster project SSHOC (Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud), it will be explained how research infrastructures can contribute to the emerging paradigms for studying social and cultural dynamics based on language data. In particular the demands for integrating heterogeneous data types will be highlighted, such a combinations of spoken and textual resources, language data and numerical data, and multimodal signals.

The lecturer

Franciska de Jong is the executive director of CLARIN ERIC, the research infrastructure for language resources that provides scholars in the humanities and social sciences with seamless access to digital language data and processing tools. She is a professor of e-research at the department of Humanities at Utrecht University and has background in language and speech technology. She has been involved in a wide range of projects aiming at advancing the access to digital libraries, ranging from news data, folk tales, interview collections and scientific information. She was local co-chair of the international conference Digital Humanities 2019, which recently took place in Utrecht, The Netherlands.