Building a Language Technology Infrastructure for Digital Humanities

Språkbanken Text, a research unit at the University of Gothenburg, forms part of the National Language Bank of Sweden and is the main coordinating node of Swe-Clarin, the Swedish national CLARIN node. During the past years, Språkbanken Text has been actively engaged in a number of humanities and social sciences related research projects. This engagement has primarily concerned the development of new resources, methods and tools to accurately process large amounts of digitized material, in addition to interfaces for visualizing the materials, making them easily accessible for further analysis. The activities within Swe-Clarin have been essential for the progress and the success of this work. In this paper we present what was required from Språkbanken Text in order to meet the expectations of researchers from the humanities and social sciences. We discuss some of the challenges this work involves and describe the opportunities this field brings with it and how these opportunities could help to progress the work of Språkbanken Text toward building a language technology infrastructure that supports interdisciplinary research.