Digital Linguistics
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Herausgegeben von:
Andreas Witt
Digital Linguistics is a growing interdisciplinary field at the crossroads of traditional linguistics, information technology and social sciences. Rather than focusing on the use of computers for performing language-related tasks (such as machine translation or voice recognition, sub-domains of Computational Linguistics), Digital Linguistics analyses, preserves and disseminates language data, i.e. digital artefacts that use language as a means of human expression. News articles, social media content, or digitized medieval manuscripts are all potential objects of interest for Digital Linguists. Closely related to Digital Humanities, Digital Linguistics is attracting increasing attention from the academic community as well as the public and private sectors, since skills in handling digital language data are considered essential in the modern economy and society.
The Digital Linguistics book series features academic publications by renowned experts on the many aspects of this new field, from research infrastructures to digital preservation methods to legal issues in language data access and re-use. It is a valuable companion for anyone interested in language and technology.
Fachgebiete
Standards function as safeguards to ensure that data remains interpretable, uniformly queryable, and archivable over time – a critical challenge for digital humanists working with complex linguistic resources. This book provides an overview of essential standards for ensuring the sustainability of data in the Digital Humanities (DH). It addresses the selection of data encoding formats, methods of annotating primary data, and approaches to making resources findable and accessible. The focus is on various forms of linguistic data, such as texts, lexicons, or parallel arrangements (e.g., translations or transcribed recordings). The work explains the role of annotations and metadata in structuring and contextualizing data and examines the influence of diverse data formats, shaped by local academic or industrial practices. In contrast to neural language models, which often yield impressive but opaque results, DH projects aim for transparency, reproducibility, and sustainability. Achieving these goals requires interoperability – the seamless interaction between data and tools. The book demonstrates how clear guidelines and best practices help ensure the long-term usability of data. It offers digital humanists practical approaches and well-founded standards to sustainably archive and efficiently utilize their data, making it an indispensable resource for the field.
CLARIN, the "Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure", has established itself as a major player in the field of research infrastructures for the humanities. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the organization, its members, its goals and its functioning, as well as of the tools and resources hosted by the infrastructure. The many contributors representing various fields, from computer science to law to psychology, analyse a wide range of topics, such as the technology behind the CLARIN infrastructure, the use of CLARIN resources in diverse research projects, the achievements of selected national CLARIN consortia, and the challenges that CLARIN has faced and will face in the future.
The book will be published in 2022, 10 years after the establishment of CLARIN as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium by the European Commission (Decision 2012/136/EU).
Watch our book talk with the editors Darja Fišer and Andreas Witt here: https://youtu.be/ZOoiGbmMbxI
Specialized corpora of the language of Computer-mediated Communication and Social Media are increasingly vital for the analysis of the "unparalleled and rapidly evolving diversity in terms of speakers and settings" in digital contexts, as well as of "language evolution seen through the lens of user-generated content, which gives access to a number of variants, socio- and idiolects" (Barbaresi 2019: 29–30).
This volume brings together corpus-based, language-centered research on CMC and social media in linguistics, philologies, communication sciences, media, and social sciences with research questions from the fields of corpus and computational linguistics, language technology, text technology, and machine learning. It features research in which computational methods and tools are used for language-centered empirical analysis of CMC and social media phenomena as well as research on building, processing, annotating, representing, and exploiting CMC and social media corpora, including their integration in digital research infrastructures.
Swedish computational lexicography has a long history at the University of Gothenburg, both in its primary role as a central aspect of the scientific study of vocabulary and also as an infrastructural component for conducting research based on language data. Starting in the 1960s, the Språkdata research group pioneered corpus-supported lexicography for Swedish, forming the basis for successive editions of two main descriptive dictionaries of contemporary Swedish, SAOL and SO. Language technological lexical resources for Swedish have been developed by the research unit/research infrastructure Språkbanken Text since the turn of the millennium, most recently in the framework of the Swedish FrameNet++ initiative. After two decades of separation, these two largely mutually independently developed strands of computational lexicography have now joined forces under the umbrella of Språkbanken’s lexical research infrastructure to advance the field technically, methodologically, and scientifically. The result is a vibrant and multifaceted research environment intertwined with and supported by a closely integrated cutting-edge computational infrastructure for working with lexical data
