The Talk of Europe – Travelling CLARIN Campus project aims to instigate pan-European collaboration by organising three international creative camps in 2014 and 2015. This 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. The first camp will be held 6-10 October at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum, the Netherlands.

The Talk of Europe (TOE) project is curating the proceedings of European Parliament (EP) from 1996 onwards, available in 21 languages, and converting these to RDF. Moreover, the data are enriched with biographical and political information on the speakers. Since the data are available in multilingual form, this dataset lends itself to be linked with resources in other European countries, such as parliamentary records or news reports. The RDF dataset and a SPARQL endpoint will be made available in September 2014. A description of the data is available online in two blog posts: 1) what you should know about the plenary debates of the EU (http://www.talkofeurope.eu/2014/05/what-you-should-know-about-the-plenary-debates/) and 2) modelling the European debates (http://www.talkofeurope.eu/2014/05/modelling-the-european-debates/).

The creative camp intends to bring together developers and academic researchers, with the goal of making inventive use of the EP dataset, exploiting web and natural language processing techniques to add new knowledge and functionality to the dataset. The goal is to develop proof-of-concept tools that can be applied in scholarly research in the political sciences and humanities.

The event will comprise five consecutive days, which will 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.


Submission of proposals
In order to participate, the TOE organisers welcome proposals describing ambitions for research tools and/or links with other datasets. Submissions should describe the following:

-General description of idea (should not exceed 1000 words) including:
-The research tool to be developed.
-The datasets to be used.
-The scholarly research problem or question to be addressed.
-For inspiration, please see www.talkofeurope.eu/cfp/inspiration
-Contact info and a short description of research interests for all participants who would like to attend.
-A work plan to indicate feasibility of proof-of-concept creation in 5 days.
-A description of how the tool will be made available after the creative camp.

To submit a proposal, please send a docx or pdf file to kemman@eshcc.eur.nl before 20 June 2014. Accepted proposals will be made available on the talkofeurope.eu website.

Criteria for acceptance
-Participants must work in a European country. Proposals from developers and academic researchers from one of the following CLARIN ERIC member or observer countries are particularly welcome: Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Dutch Language Union.
-Participants are not required to have already been involved with CLARIN.
-Master or PhD students, academics further in their career and non-academic developers are welcome.
-Proposals that include international collaboration will be prioritized.
-Datasets to be linked with the EP data may be from any type or source. Proposals with datasets available in http://catalog.clarin.eu/vlo/ are particularly welcome.
-Proposals will be ranked to create a distribution of geography of participants, language and type of tools.

Important dates
Submissions due: Friday 20 June
Acceptance notification: Friday 27 June
Creative camp: Monday 6 – Friday 10 October 2014 (5 days)

Location
The first creative camp will be held at Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum, the Netherlands.

Bursaries
The TOE organisers will offer bursaries for all participants to cover all expenses of travel to the venue and staying in the hotel in the period of Sunday 5 until Saturday 11 October 2014.

Further information
For further information and questions, please see http://www.talkofeurope.eu