Oral History under scrutiny in München - Cross disciplinary overtures between linguists, historians and social scientists

Heading to München at the end September offers the spectacle of cheerful Germans wearing dirndls and lederhosen, celebrating their Oktoberfest with remarkable enthusiasm and tons of good beer. This year, the Bavarian stronghold hosted another cheerful gathering of a dedicated community: a CLARIN multidisciplinary workshop in which scholars in the fields of speech technology, social sciences, human computer interaction, oral history and linguistics engaged with each others’ methods and digital tools. The idea is that as the use of language and speech is a common practice in all these scholarly fields, the use of a digital tool that is already mainstream in a parallel discipline, could open up new perspectives and approaches for searching, finding, selecting, processing and interpreting data. This was the fourth workshop supported by CLARIN ERIC, a European Research Infrastructure Consortium for Language Resources and Technology, offering a digital infrastructure that gives access to text and speech corpora and language technology tools for humanity scholars. One of CLARIN’s objectives is to reach out to social science and humanities scholars in order to assess how the CLARIN assets can be taken up by other disciplines than (computational) linguistics and language technology.