Dear colleagues,

We need to talk about how minority languages are supported right now.

The Celtic Knot Conference 2017 is the first Wikipedia Language conference focusing on how technology supports Celtic & Indigenous Languages.

It takes place at the University of Edinburgh Business School on Thursday 6th July 2017.

Booking closes 27 June 2017 so don't delay. All welcome.

Watch this 3 minute video if you’d like to know more.

The main objective for Celtic Knot 2017 is the coming together of those working to support Celtic and Indigenous languages in the same room at same time; strengthening the bonds 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.

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 on making the Uicipeid a hub for online Gaelic knowledge.
Dr. Sharon Arbuthnot - 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 The Kefalonian Dialect in Wiktionary and how Wikitherapy addresses social equality in open-source language projects.
Duncan Brown - Llên Natur, presenting on ‘Y BYWIADUR: the dictionary of life’.
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.
Subhashish Panigrahi presenting on Kathabhidhana, an open toolkit for anyone to record their language in a human and machine readable form.

To find out more about the conference themes and how to book your place to join us then please visit the Celtic Knot page.

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.

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