Recap DCC event: round table “Open(ing) language data”

On 16 May 2023, the second DCC data round table took place in the Harmonie building. This time, the topic was “Open(ing) language data”. The event was organised by the UG Digital Competence Centre, in collaboration with the Faculty of Arts. Speakers from various faculties gave inspiring talks about the challenges and the potential of open(ing) language data, which resulted in great discussions on topics such as longitudinal data, copyright, FAIR (social media) data, and automated transcription software.

Dr. Thomas Koelewijn started off by giving an overview of shared speech materials and data in audiology research. Dr. Myrte Gosen talked about studying publicly available language data, such as news items available on YouTube. Dr. Sebastiaan Mathôt presented his open source software OpenSesame and OSWeb, which can be used for conducting linguistic experiments. Dr. Lucas van der Deijl introduced the Drama Corpora Project (DraCor) for cross-linguistic studies in theatre history. Dr. Jorn Seubers gave a sneak preview of the open-source AI model Whisper for automated transcription. Floor van den Berg showed how she went about collecting and managing longitudinal language data. Dr. Jacolien van Rij discussed language data for investigating language learning, specifically the use of idioms in children’s books. Finally, Dr. Tommaso Caselli talked us through the process of making the Twitter data in his Dutch Abusive Language Corpus (DALC) available in DataverseNL.

The event was a great success and we look forward to welcoming you to our next DCC round table in September.