News from the Oxford Text Archive

Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School

2012-03-22T10:27:54+00:00

Save the date! From the 2nd - 6th of July 2012 DHOXSS delegates visiting the University of Oxford, UK, will be introduced to a range of topics suitable for researchers, project managers, research assistants, and students who are interested in the creation, management, or publication of digital data in the humanities.

More ECCO texts online

2012-03-22T10:26:35+00:00

Another tranche of 179 texts from the Eighteenth Century Collections Online text creation partnership are now in the public domain and are available from the OTA catalogue.

Scholarly Digital Editions, Tools and Infrastructure

2012-03-22T10:23:36+00:00

OTA contributed to an exciting symposium at the Huygens Institute in the Hague as part of the InterEdition initiative to promote the interoperability of the tools and methodology we use in the field of digital scholarly editing and research.

CLARIN European Research Infrastructure Consortium founded

2012-02-29T17:24:47+00:00

The CLARIN European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) was formally created on the 29th February 2012. This is a key stage in starting the construction of a pan-European network of services to support the creation and use of corpora and other language resources and tools. The oxford Text Archive has been a key centre in the preparatory phase of CLARIN. The money for the construction of CLARIN comes from national governments. Many European countries are making multi-million pound investments in CLARIN. Unfortunately there is currently no investment in the UK and now no formal participation in CLARIN.

Digital infrastructures for the Humanities

2011-11-03T15:43:35+00:00

A report from the European Science Foundation assesses Research Infrastructures (RIs) in Humanities research. The report argues that while there are many sophisticated RIs in other domains of science that can inform and further Humanities research, ultimately, it is also necessary for Humanities scholars to build and have access to 'fit for purpose' Humanities RIs, given the nature of their data sets, research methods and working practices.

Network of Centres meeting

2011-09-13T12:50:05+01:00

The Network of Expert Centres in the Digital Humanities in Britain and Ireland will meet at University College, London on 14th September, with Martin Wynne of the Oxford Text Archive representing the University of Oxford, and taking part in discussions about how to take the network forward in the coming period.

Discovering Babel comes to an end

2011-09-13T12:45:24+01:00

The JISC-funded 'Discovering Babel' project ended this summer. Follow the progress and lessons learned via the blog posts, listed on the OTA 'Projects' page.

OTA at Corpus Linguistics 2011

2011-07-21T14:11:11+01:00

Martin Wynne will be attending Corpus Linguistics 2011 in Birmingham this week. The event is the major conference for corpus linguistics in the UK, and perhaps globally, and takes place every two years. Participants are invited to find Martin to chat about the OTA, CLARIN and future plans for infrastructure to support digital research!

How to make language resources discoverable

2011-05-20T10:27:13+01:00

A workshop will be held in Oxford on Friday 24th June as part of the JISC-funded project 'Discovering Babel' to discuss how researchers in the UK can contribute to building more effective mechanisms for finding and using digital language resources.

Do we still need language corpora?

2011-05-20T10:25:13+01:00

The Oxford Text Archive is organizing a debate to be held at the 2011 ICAME conference in Oslo, on the motion 'Language corpora are no longer necessary for linguistic research'. Should we still spend time crafting corpora when there is a wealth of digital data online at our fingertips? What is the case for the corpus today? Watch this space to find out!

CLARIN Federated Search Workshop

2011-05-09T13:38:10+01:00

The latest work in the Oxford Text Archive to enhance and share our data was presented by Jens Stegmann and Martin Wynne, at a workshop on May 9th 2011 at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, on the topic of the CLARIN European Demonstrator Case and Federated Search.

JISC funding for the 'Discovering Babel' project

2011-02-03T16:25:51+00:00

The OTA has bidded successfully for funds from the recent call from JISC for Infrastructure for Education and Research. The project, named 'Discovering Babel' will push forward technologies and practices for promoting the discovery online of language resources.

OTA makes First Folio Shakespeare ebooks available via iTunes U

2010-10-29T14:19:57+01:00

Shakespeare's entire First Folio, including original spelling, is being made available to download for free today, as Oxford University becomes one of the world's first universities to add ePubs to iTunes U, a dedicated area within the iTunes Store. The Shakespeare ePub is made available alongside lectures on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Oxford is in a unique position to make historic and rare texts available in ePub form because of its expertise in text archiving and encoding. The University Computing Services has run the Oxford Text Archive since 1976, and the University is one of five worldwide hosts of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium. All the material has been released under a Creative Commons licence for reuse in education worldwide. The OTA will be adding more ePubs to iTunes U in the future.

Legally Safe Practices for Sharing Language Resources

2010-10-22T08:21:25+01:00

The OTA participated in a workshop at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on 'Legally Safe Practices for Sharing Language Resources', where issues relating to dealing with legal obstacles concerning the collection, distribution, and use of digital language resources as research data.

OTA at the D-SPIN Summer School

2010-09-01T14:38:37+01:00

Martin Wynne delivered the keynote presentation on 'The Humanites Virtual Research Environment of the Future' to launch the inaugural D-SPIN Summer School in Bad Homburg on 30th August 2010. D-SPIN is the national initiative in Germany to build the CLARIN research infrastructure.

e-Infrastructure Initiative in the UK

2010-08-05T14:40:46+01:00

The report from the Expert group on UK's e-infrastructure is a welcome recognition of the current dangers and opportunities. If the recommendations are adopted swiftly, there may still be time to engage with international initiatives in the Humanities such as CLARIN.

Welcome to new staff at the OTA

2010-07-21T11:17:42+01:00

Jens joins us from the IDS in Mannheim, and will be working here for six months to build new access authorization infrastructure, establish persistent URIs for resources, enhance metadata and improve OAI-PMH harvesting, as well as integrating the OTA with various CLARIN prototypes and exemplars.

Job opportunity in Oxford

2010-02-15T15:37:29+00:00

The Oxford e-Research Centre is recruiting a research assistant on a 6-month contract to work on developing interoperability of the OTA and other repositories involved in the CLARIN project. More details at http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/jobs.

Enhancing the Oxford Text Archive

2010-02-11T15:55:32+00:00

OTA staff in OUCS and the OeRC are currently implementing an ambitious set of upgrades to the repository to promote interoperability with the next generation of research environments, including the CLARIN infrastructure - see more at http://www.clarin.eu/

CHAIN - Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks

2009-11-05T17:07:10+00:00

At a recent meeting in London, leading international networks, infrastructures and planning initiatives working with digital technologies in the Humanities resolved to form CHAIN, the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks, a forum to ensure that present and future interdependent and complementary activities can be harnessed to work together to achieve a shared environment where technology services can interoperate and be sustained, thus enabling new forms of research in the Humanities.

e-Humanities at IEEE e-Science

2009-09-03T12:01:03+01:00

This year, for the first time, there will be an e-Humanities track at the IEEE e-Science Conference, to be held in Oxford from the 9th to the 11th of December 2009. More details can be found at http://www.clarin.eu/events/e-humanities-workshop-at-5th-ieee-international-conference-on-e-science.

CLARIN Short Guides

2009-03-23T17:56:46+00:00

CLARIN Short Guides explain in a concise and accessible way various aspects of the CLARIN technical architecture. The OTA is committed to contributing to these specifications and helping to build the CLARIN research infrastructure. See the Short Guides at http://www.clarin.eu/documents/short-guides. Feedback is welcome!

UK funding comes to an end

2009-03-23T17:21:14+00:00

The AHRC and JISC ceased funding for the OTA as part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service a year ago. No replacement service has been instituted, and there is no ongoing funding for the services that the OTA continues to provide to the research communities. A recent proposal for funding from the JISC for enhancement of the repository to improve the user experience was unsuccessful. The UK is now falling behind its European neighbours as it fails to invest in research infrastructure. Fortunately, the University of Oxford remains committed to the OTA, and it is a key pillar of the CLARIN European research infrastructure.