2021, Articolo in rivista, ENG
Monachini, Monica; Stamuli, Maria Francesca; Calamai, Silvia; Pretto, Niccolo; Bianchi, Silvia
Archives often include documents that can hardly be considered publications or grey literature as such, yet they maintain their documentary value and play a role of primary sources for the specialists. These documents, indeed, can help archivists to reveal the sedimentation process of the archive itself and to preserve the authentic context of the documentary production. They also appear to be very useful for the community of researchers and scholars. This happens more frequently with oral archives which include 'non-conventional sources', thus bringing together audio documents, fieldworks notes, correspondence, slipcases, analogic compact cassettes or open reels. At the cross-road of two disciplines, Archival Science and Grey Literature, this paper aims to argue the applicability of the concept of grey literature to this wide range of documentary materials, by showing the experience of Archivio Vi.Vo, a regional project aiming at building a model for archiving, preserving, managing and disseminating audio documents.
2020, Contributo in atti di convegno, ENG
Silvia Calamai, Niccolò Pretto, Monica Monachini, Maria Francesca Stamuli, Silvia Bianchi and Pierangelo Bonazzoli
Audio and audiovisual archives are at the crossroads of different fields of knowledge, yet they require common solutions for both their long-term preservation and their description, availability, use and reuse. Archivio Vi.Vo. is an Italian project financed by the Tuscany Region, aiming to (i) explore methods for long-term preservation and secure access to oral sources and (ii) develop an infrastructure under the CLARIN-IT umbrella offering several services for scholars from different domains interested in oral sources. This paper describes the project's infrastructure and its methodology through a case study on the Caterina Bueno's audio archive.
2019, Poster, ENG
Monica Monachini, Maria Francesca Stamuli, Silvia Calamai
Caterina Bueno's sound archive is composed of 476 carriers (audio reels and compact cassettes), corresponding to nearly 714 hours of recording and was digitised during the PAR-FAS project Gra.fo (Grammo-foni. Le soffitte della voce, UNISI & SNS, http://sns.grafo.it). It was located at two different owners': part of it was stored at Caterina's heirs' house, while the rest was kept by the former culture counsellor of the Municipality of San Marcello Pistoiese, in the Montagna Pistoiese, where a multi-media library was supposed to be set up. Unfortunately, disagreements and misunderstandings between the two parties have so far made the archive fragmented and inaccessible to the community. Both owners, independently, have turned to Silvia Calamai for the reassembly of the whole archive in the digital domain, in respect of the artist's wishes. After digitising, the carriers were returned to their owners, who helped in finding an arrangement for the sound archive, which can be divided according to the following categories: field-research (investigations carried out in the Tuscan countryside from the late 50s to the end of the artist's life); live performances (recordings of concerts and events); performances' rehearsals (recordings of rehearsals with musicians). In 2019 Regione Toscana decided to support the project of cataloguing and disseminating Caterina Bueno Archive and the following partners were involved: Università degli Studi di Siena (Silvia Calamai), Soprintendenza Archivistica e Bibliografica della Toscana (Maria Francesca Stamuli), CLARIN-IT (Monica Monachini), and Unione dei comuni del Casentino (Pierangelo Bonazzoli). Archivio Vi.vo will thus constitute a pilot study within CLARIN-IT to experiment methods and offer services to disciplines interested in oral sources. The ILC4CLARIN Italian node offers archiving preservation access and tools for linguistic data of a written type; within Archivio Vi.vo. the repository will be improved through experimental approach to conservation, management and access to audio and audio-video data and metadata. Archivio Vi.Vo. will develop a model which can be replicated on other audio-visual archives, even outside the context of Tuscany. The experimental activity will aim to adopt the model and high-performance computing and archiving services of the new GARR network infrastructure, built along the Cloud paradigm. This model will be disseminated both to the scientific community interested in accessing these data, and to the general public who enjoy ethnomusical materials produced in the territory.
2013, Rapporto tecnico, ENG
Pierfrancesco Moretti
2011, Rapporto di ricerca (Research report), ENG
Nicoletta Calzolari, Valeria Quochi, Claudia Soria
Despite the complexity of handling its languages, the European Union has established that cultural and language differences are a unique asset to be preserved. Europe needs to find means - such as technological ones - to overcome the language barriers to support citizens and industry in a multilingual globalised world. The large majority of industrial technological applications that handle natural language, i.e. Machine Translation, Crosslingual Information Retrieval, Multilingual Information Extraction, Automatic Document Indexing, Question Answering, Natural Language Interfaces, etc., include Language Resources as critical components. Although Language Technologies may consist of language independent engines, they depend on the availability of language-dependent knowledge under the form of Language Resources for their real-life implementation. At the same time, it is proved that a critical mass of Language Resources can make advancement in research and technology development possible and quicker, making Europe the leader of the market related to multilingualism. Companies such as Google or Microsoft play a dominant role in this framework, as they have access to a huge amount of data in many different languages, devote considerable resources to Language Technologies, have massive computing power and a direct research-to-application pipeline using a new business model based on so-called "free" services. The fact that a US company like Google is delivering some of the most comprehensive Language Technology solutions to support multilingualism should raise concern among EU officials.
2011, Rapporto di ricerca (Research report), ENG
Nicoletta Calzolari, Nuria Bel, Khalid Choukri, Joseph Mariani, Monica Monachini, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Valeria Quochi, Claudia Soria
Language Technologies (LT), together with their backbone, Language Resources (LR), provide an essential support to the challenge of Multilingualism and ICT of the future. The main task of language technologies is to bridge language barriers and to help creating a new environment where information flows smoothly across frontiers and languages, no matter the country, and the language, of origin. To achieve this goal, all players involved need to act as a community able to join forces on a set of shared priorities. However, until now the field of Language Resources and Technology has long suffered from an excess of individuality and fragmentation, with a lack of coherence concerning the priorities for the field, the direction to move, not to mention a common timeframe. The context encountered by the FLaReNet project was thus represented by an active field needing a coherence that can only be given by sharing common priorities and endeavours. FLaReNet has contributed to the creation of this coherence by gathering a wide community of experts and making them participate in the definition of an exhaustive set of recommendations.
2011, Rapporto di ricerca (Research report), ENG
Claudia Soria, Joseph Mariani
It is of utmost importance for a project such as T4ME to get a comprehensive and reliable overview of the projects and initiatives addressing similar topics. Mainly in order to establish relationships, build on previous achievement, and get a reliable and up-to-date view about the currentstate of the art. This report surveys ongoing and recent projects and initiatives at the national, EU and transnational level addressing Machine Translation, multilingual issues, language resources and technologies, or infrastructural issues at large. Focus is on Europe but relevant initia-tives outside Europe have been reviewed as well.
2011, Rapporto di ricerca (Research report), ENG
Claudia Soria, Nicoletta Calzolari
International cooperation and re-creation of a community are the most important drivers for a coherent evolution of the Language Resource (LR) area in the next years. FLaReNet has been a European forum to facilitate interaction among LR stakeholders and its structure took into account the fact that LRs present various dimensions and must be approached from many perspectives: technical, but also organisational, economic, legal, political. The Network addressed also multicultural and multilingual aspects, essential when facing access and use of digital content in today's Europe. FLaReNet consolidated existing knowledge, presenting it analytically and visibly, and contributed to structuring the area of LRs of the future by discussing new strategies to: convert existing and experimental technologies related to LRs into useful economic and societal benefits; integrate so far partial solutions into broader infrastructures; consolidate areas mature enough for recommendation of best practices; anticipate the needs of new types of LRs. The outcomes of FLaReNet has been of a directive nature, to help identify those priority areas of LRs of major interest for the public that need public funding to develop or improve. A blueprint of actions has constituted the input to policy development both at EU and national level for identifying new language policies that support linguistic diversity in Europe, in combination with strengthening the language product market, e.g. for new products and innovative services, especially for less technologically advanced languages.