CLARIAH in the Netherlands

CLARIAH in the Netherlands Jan Odijk Utrecht University Utrecht, the Netherlands E-mail: j.odijk@uu.nl Abstract I introduce CLARIAH in the Netherlands, which aims to contribute the Netherlands part of a Europe-wide humanities research infrastructure. I describe the digital turn in the humanities, the background and context of CLARIAH, both nationally and internationally, its relation to the CLARIN and DARIAH infrastructures, and the rationale for joining forces between CLARIN and DARIAH in the Netherlands. I also describe the first results of joining forces as achieved in the CLARIAH-SEED project, and the plans of the CLARIAH-CORE project, which is currently running. Keywords: research infrastructure, Humanities, CLARIN, DARIAH, CLARIAH 1. Introduction CLARIAH1 is a series of projects2 in the Netherlands that aim to design, construct and exploit a research infrastructure for humanities researchers as an integrated part of the European CLARIN3 and DARIAH research infrastructures. In this contribution I will sketch the major characteristics of CLARIAH and the rationale behind them (section 4). In particular, I will describe the rationale behind joining forces for work on CLARIN and DARIAH in the Netherlands. I will start by sketching the changing landscape in the Humanities (section 2), and the context in which the project was conceived, both at the international and at the national level (section 3). I summarize the major conclusions in section 5. 2. The Humanities are Turning Digital The amount of data that is available in digital form is increasing exponentially. This is true generally, but also for the Humanities in the Netherlands. It includes contemporary newspapers, journals, TV and radio broadcasts (texts of 1.5 million radio bulletins), new media (twitter, Facebook, etc.), but also historical newspapers (over 80 million articles, www.delpher.nl), 1 The name CLARIAH is not unique to the Netherlands. Also Austria has a CLARIAH project with the goal to contribute to the CLARIN and DARIAH infrastructures. I will use CLARIAH for the project in the Netherlands, unless confusion might arise in which case I will use CLARIAH-NL for the Dutch and CLARIAH-AT for the Austrian project. CLARIAH is (in the Netherlands) an acronym for Common Lab Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. 2 It consists of two projects which are named CLARIAH-SEED and CLARIAH-CORE. See below for more details. 3 Note that several names and acronyms in this paper are hyperlinks to relevant web sites. One can access these hyperlinks by clicking on them in the digital version. Most PDF-renderings show the hyperlinks in a different font on paper. books (over 170 k books from the 18th- 20th century) and magazines (over 1.5 million pages from the 18th and 19th century), etc. The fact that the data are becoming available in digital form implies that they can be analyzed with digital techniques. In addition, the computer hardware enables this processing, basic analysis software is available, and advanced analysis techniques, inter alia natural language processing tools and applications, often yield sufficient quality to use them. Therefore, the so-called Digital Turn creates huge opportunities for the Humanities: it can broaden the empirical …

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