We are happy to announce that Finland has joined CLARIN on 1 November 2015, becoming its 17th full member.
Finland believes that joining CLARIN ERIC advances the goal of FIN-CLARIN to further develop and strengthen the cooperation and exchange of language tools and resources in the Nordic and Baltic region as well as the EU.
The primary goal of FIN-CLARIN is to collect tools and databases consisting of thousands of millions of words of language material in the national languages of Finland to be used from the workstations of researchers. In addition to Finnish, Swedish is one of the national languages of Finland making SWE-CLARIN an important partner for exchange of tools and resources.
Large online collections of text and speech data will make the research and research-based teaching of hundreds of researchers, teachers and advanced students more rewarding and efficient. It will also let the humanities and social science scholars reach the same kind of repeatability of research results as is common in natural sciences.
Kielipankki – the Language Bank of Finland (www.kielipankki.fi) provides data and software via web services for online use and download as well as virtual high-performance work space for researchers processing large data sets. Around 1997 Kielipankki began storing and providing access to language tools and resources as a form of cooperation between the University of Helsinki and CSC – IT Center for Science. Since 2007 Kielipankki is supervised by FIN-CLARIN, a consortium of 10 universities and research centers, lead by the University of Helsinki with CSC as the trusted center.
Joining CLARIN ERIC is a milestone for Finland on its long journey towards an integrated European research infrastructure for the digital humanities.
Dr Krister Lindén, Research Director at the University of Helsinki has been appointed as National Coordinator for Finland.