PARTHENOS Workshop for CEE countries

A multidisciplinary approach to the use of technology in research using interview methods

Date Monday, 7 October, 2019 - 09:00
to
Wednesday, 9 October, 2019 - 13:00		 Partenos
Location Sofia University “St. Kl. Ohridski”,
Sofia,
Bulgaria

Workshop objectives, content and target audience

The objective of the two and a half days workshop is to foster collaboration between social sciences and humanities researchers in Central and Eastern Europe and the research communities in these fields represented in CLARIN (the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure, involving 25 countries), and in the EU funded PARTHENOS Infrastructure project (16 partners in 9 countries).

The workshop will pay special attention to the training materials and other results produced by the PARTHENOS project, and to the CLARIN Resource Families and CLARIN in general.

The target audience are researchers and lecturers in the social sciences and humanities in a broad sense who use language data in their research and/or teaching (such as literary studies, history, political science, communication science, media studies, etc.) from countries in Central and Eastern Europe that are not participating in the PARTHENOS project, with a special focus on Albania, Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Moldavia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine.

For the workshop the following 3 topics, which by their very nature lend themselves for collaborative, cross border and cross discipline research, as well as for education purposes, were selected:

  • Working with Parliamentary Records
  • Challenges in Literary History
  • Oral History: working with interview data

Oral History

A multidisciplinary approach to the use of technology in research: the case of interview data

Louise Corti, University of Essex, UK

Christoph Draxler, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

In the first part of this session, the lecture introduces different scholarly approaches when working with interview data as a primary or secondary data source. We set out some of the distinct traditions and differences in analytic practices and use of tools across the disciplines. The wide CLARIN family of digital methods and tools, in use by linguists and speech technologists, such as automated speech recognition, annotation, text analysis and emotion recognition tools, are open to wider exploitation, for example by digital humanities scholars, historians and social scientists.  We show how they can be used to support different phases of the research process, from data preparation to analysis and presentation. Connecting up tools to help meet the needs of a researcher’s analytic journey can also be beneficial. In this respect, we describe the work of the CLARIN Oral History ‘Transcription Chain’ (TChain), a tool that supports transcription, alignment and editing of audio and text in multiple languages.

The second part of the session offers a hand-on workshop, giving participants the opportunity to work with the TChain; using a dedicated portal to convert audio-visual material into a suitable format, use automatic speech recognition (ASR), correct the ASR results, and download them.

 

More information about this Parthenos event can be found on the CLARIN ERIC website.