[All] Call for Participation: Talk of Europe Creative Camp #2 - deadline Fri Jan 30 2015

[Steven Krauwer]

Call for Participation: Talk of Europe Creative Camp #2

23-27 March 2014, Amsterdam

Introduction

The "Talk of Europe – Travelling CLARIN Campus" project aims to
facilitate and stimulate pan-European collaboration in the
Humanities, Social Sciences and Computer Science, based on the
proceedings of the European Parliament (EP) by organising three
international creative camps in 2014 and 2015. These proceedings
are a rich source for humanities and social sciences researchers
that focus on areas such as European History, integration and
politics. Given their multilinguality they are also a rich source
for linguists. The Talk of Europe (TOE) project team has made
these proceeding available as Linked Data for reuse and research
purposes. They contain the debates in the EP from July 1999
onwards, including all available translations in 22 languages.
The creative camp intends to stimulate and explore this rich
source by bringing together academics from the humanities, social
sciences, computer science and related disciplines.

For our second creative camp we invite teams to submit proposals
that are driven by Humanities a/o Social Science research
questions and that can 1) be addressed by the EP proceedings,
exploiting web and natural language processing techniques and 2)
can possibly add new knowledge and functionality to the dataset.
The goal is to develop proof-of-concept tools and/or datasets
that can be applied in scholarly research in the social sciences
and humanities, or that provide insights into the EP to European
citizens. Researchers who have an idea for a proposal but no
contact with developers or vice versa, can contact the organisers
who will try to match participants where possible.

Topics

We will select proposals that aim to use and/or enrich the
proceedings of the European Parliament to address a research
question. Underlying example questions are clarified by a
possible technique or enrichment. Relevant topics and techniques
include but are not limited to:
- What kind of topics are discussed in the European Parliament?
   The only topic information given for a debate is the title. It
   would be interesting to annotate debates with theme keywords,
   deploying automated topic detection, or classify the debates in
   an existing taxonomy.
- How do Members of the European Parliament vote?
   Enriching the proceedings with data on the voting behaviour of
   individual members of the EP. This information might need to be
   extracted from the EU website.
- To what extent do Members of the European Parliament use and
   refer to official reports during the debates?
   Enriching the dataset with the official reports, which are
   available on the EU website (in HTML) and/or detecting
   references to reports in debate texts and titles and creating
   links.
- To what extent do members of the European Parliament deliberate
   on topics that are being discussed in their party programs?
   Establishing links from debates to party programs of the
   parties that participate in the European Parliament
- How are debates covered in the media?
   Discovering links between debates and media coverage (newspaper,
   radio, magazine or television) of the topics discussed in parliament
- How are debates discussed on social media?
   Discovering links to social media in which the topics under debate
   are being addressed
- Is there a relation between debates in national parliaments and
   the European Parliament?
   Creating links to proceedings of National Parliaments.

The European Parliament Dataset

The proceedings of the European Parliament have been converted to
RDF, which is a widely used standard for representing and
interchanging structured data, and linking to other data sources.
Moreover, the data are enriched with biographical and political
information on the speakers. Furthermore, the dataset lends
itself to be linked with resources in other European countries,
such as parliamentary records, social media or news reports. The
EP proceedings in RDF format, a SPARQL endpoint and a description
of the data are available on the Talk of Europe data portal. It
supports querying in free text and in the semantic web query
language SPARQL (version 1.1). For the latter, a URL (endpoint)
is available to send requests to, and the portal collects several
interfaces.

The event will comprise five consecutive days in which
participants will mainly work on their project but the week will
also include 1) presentations by humanities scholars and
political scientists on how they use political datasets, 2)
presentations by computer scientists showing best practices from
other projects and 3) practical sessions for tool development.

Bursaries

Bursaries covering travel to and from the venue and accommodation
in the period 23-27 March will be available for participants
working in EU or associated countries.

Submission of proposals

In order to participate, the TOE organisers welcome your
proposal. Submissions should be no longer than 1 A4 page and
should describe the following:
* The topic and research question to be addressed
* The technique that will be deployed
* The dataset(s), tool(s), or method(s) that you plan to use.
* The intended outcome of your participation including a
   description of how the result will be made available after the
   creative camp.
* Contact info and keywords describing research interests for all
   participants who would like to attend and a confirmation the
   participants can attend the full week.

To submit a proposal, please send a docx or pdf file to
briggeman at eshcc.eur.nl before 30 January 2015. Accepted proposals
will be made available on the talkofeurope.eu website.

Criteria for acceptance
* Proposals will be assessed based on clarity, feasibility and
   expected impact.
* In order to be eligible for the bursary, participants must work
   in an EU or Associated Country.
* If possible, resulting datasets should be made openly available
   in standard formats (e.g. CLARIN standards)
* Datasets to be linked with the EP data may be from any type or
   source.
* Researchers, Master or PhD students, academics further in their
   career and non-academic developers are all welcome.
* Proposals that include cross-border collaboration will be
   prioritized.
* Proposals will be ranked on the basis of individual quality,
   the research question, and on global criteria such as thematic,
   geographical and linguistic distribution.

Important dates
* Submissions due: 30 January 2015
* Acceptance notification: 6 February 2015
* Camp: 23-27 March 2015 (5 days)

Location
The creative camp will be held 23-27 March at the Meertens Institute,
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

About the project

The Talk of Europe project is conducted within the framework of
CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure),
which aims to equip scholars in the humanities and social
sciences with easy and sustainable access to digital language
data through advanced tools.

Talk of Europe – Travelling CLARIN Campus is a collaboration of:
* Erasmus University Rotterdam & Erasmus Studio
   o Jill Briggeman, MA
   o Dr. Martijn Kleppe
   o Prof. dr. Henri Beunders
* VU University Amsterdam
   o Astrid van Aggelen, MSc
   o Dr. Laura Hollink
* DANS
   o Marnix van Berchum MA
* Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
   o Jaap Blom
   o Johan Oomen, MA
* CLARIN-NL & CLARIN ERIC (initiators)
   o Steven Krauwer
   o Prof. dr. Jan Odijk

Made possible by support of NWO and the Dutch ministry of
Education, Culture and Research.

Further information

For further information and questions, please contact Jill Briggeman
(briggeman at eshcc.eur.nl).

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_______________________________________________________________________
Steven Krauwer, CLARIN/FEL/ELSNET/UiLOTS, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, NL
phone: +31 30 2536050, email: s.krauwer at uu.nl,  http://www-sk.let.uu.nl