LiRI: a National Technology Platform

We are happy to share the new presentation video of the national Linguistic Research Infrastructure (LiRI).

LiRI, hosted at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, provides technical and practical support for research projects in the field of linguistics, language sciences and language-related disciplines at the University of Zurich and beyond.

LiRI services fall into three main categories:

• Data acquisition: The LiRI lab has equipment and software for generating and collecting linguistic research data. The facilities can be used by scientists or other users interested in natural language data (i.e. audiovisual, textual and speech data), and by language researchers working on experimental data (e.g. eye-tracking, electroencephalographic, behavioral).

• Data management: LiRI can set up and manage customized virtual machine (VM) servers for the purposes of processing, analysis, storage and backup of linguistic research data. These VM servers are part of the ScienceCloud environment of the University of Zurich and are accessible both within the UZH network and world wide. From summer 2022 onwards, publication-ready data for long-term archiving can be directly ingested into the SWISSUBase infrastructure, a Swiss national center for research data.

• Collaboration and support:The Linguistic Research Infrastructure offers technical and methodological assistance to researchers on how best to collect, process and analyze the linguistic data they require. A project's infrastructure needs can be discussed in an initial, free of charge consultation. Depending on the complexity of the project, support could range from occasional guidance to LiRI managing all data acquisition and processing. LiRI staff members can also advise on project budgets and data management plans.