CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) is a consortium of countries (ERIC) that have taken up the mission to create and maintain a distributed infrastructure consisting of a central service platform and a network of centres offering access to digital language resources and related tools for scholars in the social sciences and humanities and beyond, to help them discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse or combine data.
Time Machine is a Large-Scale Research Initiative (LRSI) built around the vision to develop the Big Data of the Past, a distributed digital information system mapping the European social, cultural and geographical evolution. Whereas CLARIN provides access to a variety of human language data types and the tools to research their various dimensions, Time Machine aims to unlock the information on the broader historical and cultural context in which European languages have evolved.
CLARIN ERIC and Time Machine have decided to join forces to facilitate scholarly and wider access to cultural heritage by reinforcing existing synergies regarding their aims, activities, and resources.
Franciska the Jong (Executive Director of CLARIN ERIC) announced the starting of this fruitful collaboration between CLARIN ERIC and Time Machine at the CLARIN Annual Conference 2019 in Leipzig (DE).
The domains where potential for synergy exists include: digital methods for scholarly research; technology development that can be integrated into research infrastructures; and knowledge production facilitated by shared data, infrastructure and technical capacity. Setting up collaborative activities between CLARIN and Time Machine will ensure interoperability for textual and other data that reflect historical, cultural and societal dynamics. In recognising their potential for synergy, CLARIN and Time Machine also intend to work towards joint research, technology and infrastructure development, and to adopt a governance model for their common activities.