This years Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (DHNB) conference took place in Reykjavík, Iceland. And Språkbanken Text was strongly represented. Leif-Jöran Olsson was involved in the organisation of the workshop "Digital Parliamentary Data in Action" (DiPaDA 2024) but could only participate remotely while Niklas Zechner and the author were at the conference in person to present work on classification of book reviews in Swedish newspapers and work on setting up a research data repository, respectively.
Traveling to Iceland in May is quite an experience. Starting from Frankfurt in complete darkness, flying northward is a constant travel towards the light. The main reason why it was rather dark when arriving at the Airport Keflavik, about 50 kilometers from Reykjavík, was the bad weather, being welcomed by rain and wind. Wind is definitely a common company on this island high up in the north.
The author used the opportunity to explore the city and its surroundings before the conference started on Wednesday, enjoying some of the natural wonders Iceland provides. After two days of workshops the main conference started at lunch time on Wednesday with an opening event. Both the conference and workshops took place at the University of Iceland School of Education. Just in time the local, previously friendly, volcanoes on the same peninsula as the airport became more active, potentially threatening the participants future trips home. and the life-stream of the volcanoes spitting out molten lava became a common sight during the conference.
The conference kicked off with a keynote by Sally Chambers of DARIAH fame (where she is a member of the DARIAH board of directors). She talked about the relevance of libraries as the "laboratories" for the Humanities. She furthermore dived into the idea of collections-as-data giving examples from Luxembourg and Scotland and presented the Vancouver statement on collection-as-data. She concluded the talk by referencing the collection-as-data checklist and elaborated on how it is implemented as a workflow within the Social Sciences & Humanities (SSH) Open Marketplace.
In several sessions research relevant for the work and research at Språkbanken Text was presented, most obviously the linguistics (NLP) and AI sessions
The final point on the conference agenda before the official closure was the second keynote by Thor Magnusson.