Dear colleagues,

Please disseminate this open invitation to a University of Edinburgh and Wikimedia UK conference to interested colleagues as appropriate.

How can technology support language communities?

Join us at the Celtic Knot conference taking place Thursday 6 July 2017 at the University of Edinburgh Business School to find out. Our programme is now live!

Keynote speakers

• Professor Antonella Sorace - Professor of Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and founding director of Bilingualism Matters will be speaking on ‘Bilingualism in minority languages: a resource and an opportunity’.
• Jason Evans - Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Wales will discuss his strategy for working with Wikimedia UK and the Welsh Government to develop the Welsh Wicipedia using a combination of community engagement, data manipulation and the implementation of Open Access policies.

Confirmed speakers also include:

• Susan Ross – Gaelic Wikipedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland.
• Dr. Sharon Arbuthnot - Research Fellow, Queen's University, Belfast. Presenting on the AHRC-funded eDIL project (Irish Language dictionary) on Wednesday 5^th July.
• Gareth Morlais – the Welsh Language Unit, Welsh Government.  Gareth will speak about how mapping how much importance major companies (Google, Twitter, Apple) attach to creative activity on Wikipedia led to the Welsh Government helping to fund two Welsh-language Wikipedia initiatives.
• Delyth Prys – Head of the Language Technologies Unit, Bangor University, will speak on Welsh/Celtic speech technology and why text-to-speech and speech recognition are becoming increasingly important in our digital world.
• Àlex Hinojo – Executive Director, Amical Wikimedia on the Catalan language project.
• Iñaki Lopez de Luzuriaga – Developing the Basque Wikipedia: From corpus expansion to outreach.
• Astrid Carlsen – Executive Director, Wikimedia Norge speaking on Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and building a project to revitalize the Northern Sami Wikipedia.
• Robin Owain – Wales Manager, Wikimedia UK, speaking on recent developments supporting the Welsh language community.
• Mina Theofilatou  presenting on ‘Adult Learners from the Ionian Islands of Corfu and Kefalonia sharing Cultural Heritage on Wikimedia Commons and Wiktionary’.
• Duncan Brown - Llên Natur, presenting on ‘Y BYWIADUR: the dictionary of life’.
• Rémy Gerbet - Wikimedia France; presenting on the Lingua Libre project for massive open audio recording.
• Käbi Suvi - Wikimedia Estonia on the ‘Miljon+’ project as part of Estonia’s 100^th anniversary.
• Ilario Valdelli - Wikimedia Switzerland, speaking on the Digital Library in Romansch and the new initiatives to map the archeological sites connected with Celtic culture in the Alps.

The main objective for Celtic Knot 2017 is the coming together of practitioners in the same room at same time; strengthening the bonds of those working to support language communities into a 'knot' and leading into action. We welcome diverse attendees ranging from Wikimedians, linguists, educators, researchers, information professionals, media professionals, translators, learning technologists and more coming together to share good practice and find fruitful new collaborations to support language communities as a result of the event.

To find out more about the conference themes and how to book your place to join us then please visit the Celtic Knot page. To assist with seeing areas of commonality and links between your work and the Wikimedia projects you can click here.

It promises to be a great event – including a panel on the Politics of Language Online, excellent papers, workshops and discussion spaces. Please feel free to forward this event to interested colleagues in your network.

If you would like to learn more then please contact me direct at ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk.

Very best regards,

Ewan McAndrew
Wikimedian in Residence

Tel: 07719 330076
Email: ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk
Subscribe to the mailing list: wikimedia@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk
My working hours are 10.30am to 6.30pm Monday to Friday.
Wikipedia Project Page for the residency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:University_of_Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, Floor H (West), Argyle House, 3 Lady Lawson Street, Edinburgh, EH3 9DR.
www.ed.ac.uk