In May 2025 the UK formally joined the CLARIN European Research Infrastructure Consortium as a full member. CLARIN (short for Common Language Resources and Tools Infrastructure) supports the digital turn in research in all areas where language technologies are relevant, and aims to connect datasets, software applications, institutions and people. Researchers in Oxford and nationwide can make use of CLARIN services such as the Virtual Language Observatory to find language corpora and other datasets, and have access to a wide and growing range of services, from the central hub and from centres across Europe.

Here in Oxford, we coordinate the CLARIN-UK network, in which an active consortium of leading centres in corpus and computational linguistics and digital humanities have come together to support the creation and use of digital language resources. Oxford also hosts the CLARIN Knowledge Centre Digital Resources for the Languages in Ireland and Britain (DR-LIB), and the National Coordinator for CLARIN in the UK is our own Martin Wynne.

UK membership of CLARIN is supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, the major national funder in the university and research sector. At the national level, AHRC is also responsible for the Infrastructure for Digital Arts and Humanities (iDAH) programme, which is part of the UKRI's digital research infrastructure investment, which includes the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) , a national repository for literary and linguistic resources, and the UK repository for CLARIN.