Digital Language Infrastructures – Documenting Language Actors

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3457–3462 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3457 Digital Language Infrastructures – Documenting Language Actors Verena Lyding1, Alexander König1,2, Monica Pretti1 1 Institute for Applied Linguistics, Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy 2 CLARIN ERIC, the Netherlands verena.lyding@eurac.edu, alex@clarin.eu, pretti.monica@gmail.com Abstract The major European language infrastructure initiatives like CLARIN (Hinrichs and Krauwer, 2014), DARIAH (Edmond et al., 2017) or Europeana (Europeana Foundation, 2015) have been built by focusing in the first place on institutions of larger scale, like specialized research departments and larger official units like national libraries, etc. However, besides these principal players also a large number of smaller language actors could contribute to and benefit from language infrastructures. Especially since these smaller institutions, like local libraries, archives and publishers, often collect, manage and host language resources of particular value for their geographical and cultural region, it seems highly relevant to find ways of engaging and connecting them to existing European infrastructure initiatives. In this article, we first highlight the need for reaching out to smaller local language actors and discuss challenges related to this ambition. Then we present the first step in how this objective was approached within a local language infrastructure project, namely by means of a structured documentation of the local language actors landscape in South Tyrol. We describe how the documentation efforts were structured and organized, and what tool we have set up to distribute the collected data online, by adapting existing CLARIN solutions. Keywords: local infrastructure, language actors, institution catalog 1. Introduction Existing digital language infrastructures like CLARIN (Hin- richs and Krauwer, 2014), DARIAH (Edmond et al., 2017) or Europeana (Europeana Foundation, 2015) have been built by focusing in the first place on well-established and spe- cialized research institutions and larger official units like national libraries, major European museums etc. This is sensible as it allowed to gather and develop best practices and joint solutions among established centers of expertise to "create and maintain an infrastructure to support the shar- ing, use and sustainability of language data and tools"1. However, besides these principal players and some smaller actors, an even larger number of local language institutions could contribute to and benefit from language infrastruc- tures. This is especially true at this point in time, where the basics for creating language infrastructures are on a good way. As these smaller institutions, like local libraries, archives and publishers, often collect, manage and host lan- guage resources of particular value for their geographical and cultural region, it seems particularly relevant to find ways of engaging and connecting them to existing Euro- pean infrastructure initiatives. In this paper, we highlight the need to reach out to smaller language actors on a local scope and report on a concrete effort we have made to tackle this need within the context of the DI-ÖSS project2. The project aims at taking the first steps towards creating a local language infrastructure for South Tyrol, …

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