Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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centerNET
centerNET is “an <strong>in</strong>ternational network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and
collaborative action that will benefit digital humanities and allied fields <strong>in</strong> general, and centers as
humanities cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure <strong>in</strong> particular.” 733 This network grew out of a meet<strong>in</strong>g hosted by the
NEH and the University of Maryland, College Park, <strong>in</strong> 2007 and was created <strong>in</strong> response to the ACLS
Report on Cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure <strong>in</strong> the Humanities (ACLS 2006). The largest component of this website
is an <strong>in</strong>ternational directory 734 of over 200 digital humanities organizations that can be viewed
alphabetically. Each organization entry <strong>in</strong>cludes a short description and a l<strong>in</strong>k to the organization’s
website. To be <strong>in</strong>cluded <strong>in</strong> the directory, an organization simply has to request to jo<strong>in</strong>. As of July 2010,
a new beta website 735 for centerNET was announced that <strong>in</strong>cludes a Google Map of all of the
registered digital humanities organizations, an aggregated web feed from all registered centers’
websites or blogs, an updated directory of centers that can be searched or limited by geographic
category, and a resource list that <strong>in</strong>cludes a l<strong>in</strong>k to a frequently updated “digital research tools
wiki.” 736
CLARIN
CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) is a pan-European project
that is work<strong>in</strong>g to “establish an <strong>in</strong>tegrated and <strong>in</strong>teroperable research <strong>in</strong>frastructure of language
resources and its technology.” It “aims at lift<strong>in</strong>g the current fragmentation, offer<strong>in</strong>g a stable, persistent,
accessible and extendable <strong>in</strong>frastructure and therefore enabl<strong>in</strong>g eHumanities.” 737 The <strong>in</strong>tegrated
environment of services and resources will be based on grid technologies, use Semantic Web
technologies to ensure semantic <strong>in</strong>teroperability, and be extendable so that new resources and services
can be added. CLARIN plans to help l<strong>in</strong>guists improve their models and tools, aid humanities scholars
<strong>in</strong> learn<strong>in</strong>g to access and use language technology, and “lower thresholds to multil<strong>in</strong>gual and
multicultural content.” CLARIN ultimately plans to build a “virtual distributed research <strong>in</strong>frastructure”
through a “federation of trusted archive centers that will provide resources and tools through web
services with a s<strong>in</strong>gle sign-on” (Váradi et al. 2008)
CLARIN also seeks to address the issue of heterogeneous language resources <strong>in</strong> a fragmented
environment and to connect resources and tools that already exist with scholars <strong>in</strong> the humanities:
The benefits of computer-enhanced language process<strong>in</strong>g will become available only when a
critical mass of coord<strong>in</strong>ated effort is <strong>in</strong>vested <strong>in</strong> build<strong>in</strong>g an enabl<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>frastructure, which will
make the exist<strong>in</strong>g tools and resources readily accessible across a wide span of doma<strong>in</strong>s and
provide the relevant tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g and advice (Váradi et al. 2008).
The CLARIN project especially wishes to turn the large number of exist<strong>in</strong>g and dispersed technologies
and sources <strong>in</strong>to “accessible and stable services” that users can share and repurpose. Other key themes
they are deal<strong>in</strong>g with are “persistent identifiers, component metadata, concept registries, and support
for virtual collections” (Dallas and Doorn 2009).
As CLARIN is a very large project with many deliverables, its organization is divided <strong>in</strong>to seven work
packages: management and coord<strong>in</strong>ation; technical <strong>in</strong>frastructure; humanities overview; language
733 http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/
734 http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/page_id=4
735 http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet_new/
736 http://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/
737 http://www.clar<strong>in</strong>.eu/external/<strong>in</strong>dex.phppage=about-clar<strong>in</strong>&sub=0