Reflections on the past, present and future of the OTA. Presented at the Czech DARIAH workshop October 2021

1. Event
DARIAH-CZ National Workshop 2021
Thursday 21st
October 2021
https://lindat.cz/events/workshop2021
Forty-five Years of the
Oxford Text Archive
From magnetic tapes to CLARIN-UK
Martin Wynne
martin.wynne@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk
Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics,
University of Oxford
National Coordinator, CLARIN-UK

2. What was happening in the 1970s?

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Oxford Text Archive, 45 years on and in a new home
OTA at 40 blog post: https://ota.hypotheses.org/date/2016/08

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1 1976 Start of the Oxford Text Archive, based in Oxford University Computing Services
(OUCS), by Lou Burnard
1978 Oxford Concordance Programme launched by Susan Hockey
1979 Kurzweil data entry machine (KDEM) installed in OUCS
1987 Start of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
1989 Start of the project to build the British National Corpus
1989 Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) Centre for Textual Studies
1994 Launch of British National Corpus (BNC)
1995 First publication of TEI Guidelines
1995 Humanities Computing Unit formed in OUCS
1996 Start of Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS)
2008 Start of Common Languages Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN)
2008 End of Arts and Humanities Data Service
2015 EEBO TCP texts available via OTA
2016 OTA moves to the Bodleian Libraries, and start of migration to CLARIN DSpace
2019 Launch of CLARIN DSpace repository
2021 UK increases investment in CLARIN, and Infrastructure for Digital Arts and
Humanities programme; new CLARIN DSpace repository in Faculty of Linguistics, Philology
and Phonetics
History of the OTA – some highlights

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Some Lessons learned
●
It is necessary to keep justifying services for people outside of
your own institution.
●
Be patient and “play the long game”: if it’s a good idea, it’s time
will come.
●
Try to retain staff, experience, expertise, “institutional memory”,
if you don’t want to make the same mistakes again
●
Beware institutional dependencies and unreliable partners – have
exit plans from all of your relationships
●
Innovate: don’t stand still but prepare for the next phase of
development

6. [ota slide / demo, inc ota-qa!]

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The OTA is changing
More than Oxford
More than Text
More than an Archive

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The OTA is changing
More than Oxford...
...a national service for all of the UK, and as a national node in the CLARIN
European Research Infrastructure. So let's make it clear that it's not just for Oxford,
it's for everyone.
More than Text...
...we expect to see increasing amounts of audio, video and multimodal resources
created by research projects and others.
More than an Archive...
The Data Service will do more than archive resources. It will be a living repository,
accepting deposit of new resources and connecting them to tools.

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Future plans
●
Beyond download: connect data to tools, e.g. CLARIN Language
Resources Switchboard
●
Beyond text: more audio, more video (but still more text!)
●
Beyond Oxford: more partnerships, aA node in a national data
curation service, and the home for the coordination of CLARIN-UK

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CLARIN-UK
●
Started with three universities in the CLARIN Preparatory
Phase project (Lancaster, Oxford, Sheffield)
●
CLARIN-UK Consortium formed c.2014 (ten members
initially)
●
UK Observer in CLARIN ERIC 2015-21
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Moving towards full membership - Extraordinary
extension with additional fees 2021
●
UK national research infrastructure funding expected
2022 onwards

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13. CQPweb: an online interface for many corpora
http://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk

14. GATE
http://gate.ac.uk/

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Links
Oxford Text Archive: https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
CLARIN-UK: https://www.clarin.ac.uk/
OTA at 40 blog post: https://ota.hypotheses.org/date/2016/08