At this year’s ESOF (European Science Open Forum), which was held in Manchester from 25 to 28 July 2016, recent developments around cutting-edge science were presented and debated among scientists and representatives of science organizations, policymakers and funders, business and industry, and the general public. As in previous years, the event was very well organized and attended, and received much attention in the media. Also as in previous years, the focus was predominantly on the hard or exact sciences including life-sciences.
This year, however, CLARIN was present and organized a panel on the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), called “Big Science is not just for Physics”, where the position of the SSH and their infrastructures was brought up, and the case was made that via infrastructures such as CLARIN, big data is fruitfully made available for SSH research.
After an introduction to CLARIN by CLARIN’s Executive Director, Franciska de Jong, three showcases were presented:
- Migration Maps: Geographical visualization of biographies by André Blessing and others, University Stuttgart, presented by Sebastian Drude because Dieu Thu Le unfortunately did not get a UK visa in time)
- War in Parliament, exploitation of 1945–1995 parliament transcripts in political and social science and history, My Martijn Kleppe, now Royal Library of the Netherlands
- Two showcases: Corpus and text analysis of ancient texts and tweets: Language technology, a shortcut to scientific evidence, by Claus Povlsen, University Copenhagen
- The session was very well chaired by Svenja Adolphs from University Nottingham.
During the session which had a duration of 75 minutes, a small survey about the SSH and Research Infrastructures was held, with non-representative but still interesting results.
The session received a short blog review (which however unfortunately contains a number of shortcomings).