Call for Participation: Talk of Europe Creative Camp #2
23-27 March 2014, Amsterdam

The Talk of Europe – Travelling CLARIN Campus project aims to facilitate
and stimulate pan-European collaboration in the Humanities, Social Sciences
and Computer Science, based on the proceedings of the European Parliament
(EP) by organising three international creative camps in 2014 and 2015. The
proceedings are a rich source for humanities and social sciences
researchers that focus on areas such as European History, integration and
politics. Given their multilinguality they are also a rich source for
linguists.

The Talk of Europe (TOE) project team has made these proceedings available
as Linked Data for reuse and research purposes. They contain the debates in
the EP from July 1999 onwards, including all available translations in 22
languages. The creative camp intends to stimulate and explore this rich
source by bringing together academics from the humanities, social sciences,
computer science and related disciplines.

For our second creative camp we invite teams to submit proposals that are
driven by Humanities a/o Social Science research questions and that can 1)
be addressed by the EP proceedings, exploiting web and natural language
processing techniques and 2) can possibly add new knowledge and
functionality to the dataset. The goal is to develop proof-of-concept tools
and/or datasets that can be applied in scholarly research in the social
sciences and humanities, or that provide insights into the EP to European
citizens. Researchers who have an idea for a proposal but no contact with
developers or vice versa, can contact the organisers who will try to match
participants where possible.

*Topics*
We will select proposals that aim to use and/or enrich the proceedings of
the European Parliament to address a research question. Underlying example
questions are clarified by a possible technique or enrichment. Relevant
topics and techniques include but are not limited to:
-    What kind of topics are discussed in the European Parliament? The only
topic information given for a debate is the title. It would be interesting
to annotate debates with theme keywords, deploying automated topic
detection, or classify the debates in an existing taxonomy.
-    How do Members of the European Parliament vote? Enriching the
proceedings with data on the voting behaviour of individual members of the
EP. This information might need to be extracted from the EU website.
-    To what extent do Members of the European Parliament use and refer to
official reports during the debates?
-    Enriching the dataset with the official reports, which are available
on the EU website (in HTML) and/or detecting references to reports in
debate texts and titles and creating links.
-    To what extent do members of the European Parliament deliberate on
topics that are being discussed in their party programs? Establishing links
from debates to party programs of the parties that participate in the
European Parliament
-    How are debates covered in the media? Discovering links between
debates and media coverage (newspaper, radio, magazine or television) of
the topics discussed in parliament
-    How are debates discussed on social media? Discovering links to social
media in which the topics under debate are being addressed
-    Is there a relation between debates in national parliaments and the
European Parliament? Creating links to proceedings of National Parliaments.

*European Parliament Dataset*
The proceedings of the European Parliament have been converted to RDF,
which is a widely used standard for representing and interchanging
structured data, and linking to other data sources. Moreover, the data are
enriched with biographical and political information on the speakers.
Furthermore, the dataset lends itself to be linked with resources in other
European countries, such as parliamentary records, social media or news
reports. The EP proceedings in RDF format, a SPARQL endpoint and a
description of the data are available on the Talk of Europe data portal. It
supports querying in free text and in the semantic web query language
SPARQL (version 1.1). For the latter, a URL (endpoint) is available to send
requests to, and the portal collects several interfaces.

The event will comprise five consecutive days in which participants will
mainly work on their project but the week will also 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.

*Bursaries*
Bursaries covering travel to and from the venue and accommodation in the
period 23-27 March will be available for participants working in EU or
associated countries.

*Submission of proposals*
In order to participate, the TOE organisers welcome your proposal.
Submissions should be no longer than 1 A4 page and should describe the
following:
•    The topic and research question to be addressed
•    The technique that will be deployed
•    The dataset(s), tool(s), or method(s) that you plan to use.
•    The intended outcome of your participation including a description of
how the result will be made available after the creative camp.
•    Contact info and keywords describing research interests for all
participants who would like to attend and a confirmation the participants
can attend the full week.
To submit a proposal, please send a docx or pdf file to
[log in to unmask]  before 30 January 2015. Accepted proposals will be
made available on the talkofeurope.eu website.
*Criteria for acceptance*
•    Proposals will be assessed based on clarity, feasibility and expected
impact.
•    In order to be eligible for the bursary, participants must work in an
EU or Associated Country.
•    If possible, resulting datasets should be made openly available in
standard formats (e.g. CLARIN standards)
•    Datasets to be linked with the EP data may be from any type or source.
•    Researchers, Master or PhD students, academics further in their career
and non-academic developers are all welcome.
•    Proposals that include cross-border collaboration will be prioritized.
•    Proposals will be ranked on the basis of individual quality, the
research question, and on global criteria such as thematic, geographical
and linguistic distribution.
*Important dates*
•    Submissions due: 30 January 2015
•    Acceptance notification: 6 February 2015
•    Camp: 23-27 March 2015 (5 days)

*Location*
The creative camp will be held 23-27 March at the Meertens Institute,
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

About the project
The Talk of Europe 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.

Talk of Europe – Travelling CLARIN Campus is a collaboration of:
•    Erasmus University Rotterdam & Erasmus Studio

    o    Jill Briggeman, MA
    o    Dr. Martijn Kleppe
    o    Prof. dr. Henri Beunders

•    VU University Amsterdam

    o    Astrid van Aggelen, MSc
    o    Dr. Laura Hollink

•    DANS

    o    Marnix van Berchum MA

•    Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

    o    Jaap Blom
    o    Johan Oomen, MA

•    CLARIN-NL & CLARIN ERIC (initiators)

    o    Steven Krauwer
    o    Prof. dr. Jan Odijk

Made possible by support of NWO and the Dutch ministry of OCW.

*Further information*
For further information and questions, please contact Jill Briggeman (
[log in to unmask])

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Kind regards,

Erwin Verbruggen
Project lead R&D

Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Media Parkboulevard 1, 1217 WE  Hilversum | Postbus 1060, 1200 BB
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