[Sigwac] Call for discussion: The SIGWAC crisis (instead, of an announcement of WAC-XI)

[Roland Schäfer]

Dear Adrien,

thanks a lot for joining the discussion.

On 01.08.17 11:54, Adrien Barbaresi wrote:
> 
> If I understand correctly, the CLARIN or YaCy initiatives share a common
> ground, that is resource pooling. We could confer on how to make part of
> our corpora available under a "meta" multilingual search engine. A
> research consortium such as CLARIN can help at the institutional level,
> and distributed search engines like YaCy are a practical solution for
> low-resource cooperation.

That is surely true, and it is a valid option. My two main objections are:

1. This is not a research question, but a question of generating more
users or giving users a consistent interface for many resources (= CLARIN).

2. I think it will be difficult to achieve this, given that the major
European web corpus projects are – besides the one you are involved in –
SketchEngine and COW, and Aranea. I don't know about Aranea, but since
SketchEngine is a fully self-contained high-quality paid service, would
they agree to join such an effort? And given the unsolved intellectual
property situation in the EU, esp. Germany, COW simply cannot do that
(except for COCO, if some CLARIN repo takes the full risk of recovering
the corpora from CommonCrawl and the COCCOA stand-off files, which I
doubt they will).

I admit, though, that none of the contributors to this discussion has
expressed much enthusiasm towards my suggestions to tackle more
fundamental conceptual issues and to invite totally new groups of
contributors so far. I therefore suggest that people start thinking
about who they want as the next chairman of SIGWAC. As I said in my
original email, I will not resign abruptly, of course.

Best,
Roland