European Cultural Heritage Online - ECHO

usage, for the purpose of analysing as diverse phenomena as, for example, spoken languages,sign languages (interestingly, these languages lack adequate writing systems, and multimediarepresentations therefore have an important role to play for their documentation), minoritylanguages and endangered languages, child language acquisition, writing development inschool children, translation and simultaneous interpretation, etc etc. Still, written text is, todate, the prevailing manifestation of languages which the research community is concernedwith. Spoken languages are often studied in a transcribed form (that is, after they have beenwritten down) and many so-called national language corpora are based solely on written texts(such as newspaper text and novels). Today, every language department with self esteem isworking with computerized language samples and computational methods of analysis. Butthere is little coordination of efforts and very little systematic sharing of data. In particular,metadata (systematic and structured descriptions of the data) are either absent or extremelymeagre. In the languages section of this report (3.1), we focus on experiences during the firstsix months of the ECHO pilot project of trying to recruit providers of data and metadata aswell as to explore potential communities of users.With respect to the cultural domain of ethnography, the present situation is principally builtaround objects which are kept in ethnographic museums and/or in institutions dealing withextra-European material. Ethnographical material, however, is not understandable withoutadditional comments on the societies that have produced them. These comments can be madeby natives or by specialists — ethnographers and anthropologists — who have studied them.The fact that collections and ethnographers are not under the same roof therefore means anessential challenge to meet demands on communication and infrastructural support to realizean exchange and complementarity between the two — the kind of challenge ECHO isdesigned to meet. In the ethnography section of this report (3.2), we focus on observationsmade from a widely distributed questionnaire, concerning digitized databases of non-European objects and societies within European museums.With respect to the cultural domain of history of science the situation is also varying.There is a lot of unorganized information on different levels of quantity and quality ofMaterial presented on the Web. To use the Web for research works it seems necessary notonly to classify the web presentations but also to evaluate the presented material as well as thetools, the interoperability functions and annotation possibilities.In the history of science section of this report (3.3), we focus on significant examples and theexperiences collected by international scientists in the area of history of science.With respect to the cultural domain of history of art there is a lack of presentations on historyof art on the Internet. Various collections and presentations of museums are available, but thetools to do research work with this material is mostly missing.In the history of art section of this report (3.4), we focus on a comparison of differentexamples of web presentations including analysis of available tools to use the Internet forresearch work in the area of history of art.3.1 Languages (Strömqvist, Uneson, Eklund & Crasborn)The present situationA quick search on the world wide web for ”language resources european” gives a firstindication of the large amount of descriptions of languages, tools for linguistic analysis andsamples of languages which are scattered around the world, especially the university world.6