From the Museums of Greece to CLARIN:EL

To celebrate International Museum Day (18 May), we dedicate this month to language resources which are hosted in the CLARIN:EL Infrastructure and constitute members of the Museums Resource Family.

Panagiotis Arvanitis, Professor of Digital Technologies in Education & Language Teaching of the Department of Language & Didactics of the School of French Language and Literature of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, talks about the Museums of Greece, a corpus of 1.609.480 words, which is freely available for research purposes through CLARIN:EL under a CC-BY-NC-SA License of Use (Attribution, Non-Commercial use, Share Alike).

The corpus includes texts of several websites that belong, describe or refer to museums and cultural institutions of Greece, as they are thematically classified and listed in the website of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, the website of ODYSSEUS, as well as the website of WIKIPEDIA.

More precisely, the corpus includes the following 9 categories of museums: archaeological, byzantine, historical, folklore, art, natural history and technology museums, as well as a category named other comprising the rest of the museums. The texts were automatically extracted with the BootCaT software tool where for each museum a web research was conducted.

Each museum category constitute a separate entry in the CLARIN:EL Infrastructure, connected to the present corpus by a "part-of" relation.

The resource has already been used in the context of undergraduate courses (Multimedia databases and development of Electronic Dictionaries, Multilingual digital environments for language teaching) and postgraduate courses (Emerging Web Technologies and Digital Classroom, Digital Humanities) at the School of French Language and Literature of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in order to train students in text corpus analysis.

Museums of Greece is a language resource of particular interest as it includes specialized vocabulary referring to museums, cultural institutions, cultural events, cultural educational activities, travel and tourist information, etc.