13.8 million for innovative user-friendly tools to search digital sources

As part of the Dutch National Roadmap for Large-Scale Scientific Infrastructure, Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science has awarded € 13.8 million to the CLARIAH PLUS project on behalf of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The award was received by the Principal Investigator Lex Heerma van Voss, director of Huygens ING, on behalf of a national consortium of universities and humanities institutes. It is one of ten projects awarded and the only consortium from the social sciences and the humanities that has been honored.

F.l.t.r. Martijn Kleppe (KB), Julia Noordegraaf (UvA), Jan Odijk (UU), Lex Heerma van Voss (Huygens ING), Gertjan Filarski (Huygens ING), Richard Zijdeman (IISG), representatives for the CLARIAH consortium during the NWO award ceremony.

CLARIAH stands for Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities and concerns a digital infrastructure that brings together large collections of data and software from different humanities fields. The MPI's The Language Archive contributes as one of those collections. For the analysis of such a huge data-generator, special ICT applications are needed that are both innovative and user-friendly for the scientists who want to make use of this.

What does the award mean for the MPI?

“The CLARIAH-PLUS grant will allow the MPI to enrich the tools and collections of The Language Archive,” says Paul Trilsbeek, head of The Language Archive. “Our archive consists of an extensive collection of recorded language data, a large part of which is still untranscribed and unanalysed. This is an enormous task where this grant will help significantly. One of the goals of CLARIAH-PLUS is to employ more automated methods for transcribing and analysing multimedia recordings. In addition, we are planning to enhance the methods for researchers to find, use and cite the collections in our archive.”

Consortium

The consortium behind the project that has committed to CLARIAH for the next ten years consists of Huygens ING, the Dutch Language Institute, the MPI, the International Institute of Social History (IISH), the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), the Meertens Institute, and Sound and Vision. The following institutions also participate: Data Archiving and Network Services (DANS), Fryske Akademie, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), National Archives, Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Netherlands eScience Center, Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD), Radboud University, University of Groningen Groningen, Leiden University, Maastricht University, Utrecht University, University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit.

Roadmap grants

The Roadmap grants are awarded to scientific infrastructure of great importance for the performance of innovative scientific research and as a driver of social and economic innovation in all scientific disciplines. In this round, an amount of € 108 million for grants was available through the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science budget. In the Coalition Agreement it was agreed to work even more firmly on scientific facilities. As a result, the budget was increased by € 30 million to € 138 million.

More information

• For more information on the National Roadmap for large-scale scientific infrastructure, see www.nwo.nl/roadmap
• Read more about the CLARIAH  project here: http://www.clariah.nl
• Read more about the Language Archive here: http://tla.mpi.nl/

For additional information, please contact:

Paul Trilsbeek
Phone: +31-24-3521203
Email: Paul.Trilsbeek [at] mpi.nl (Paul[dot]Trilsbeek[at]mpi[dot]nl)