MEDAL chosen as project of the year 2023

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities presents annual awards to best endeavors and outstanding employees in December each year. This year MEDAL (Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics) was chosen as project of the year 2023.

The MEDAL (Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics) project which was launched in January by the European Commission is an international consortium for the development and teaching of linguistics methodology initiated by linguists from the University of Tartu. The aim of the project is to develop the competence of researchers from all four partner universities in linguistic methods, paying special attention to the development of the skills of young researchers and students, and to combine different methods, languages and research groups.

Already in June, a corpus linguistics summer school was organized in Tartu with 100 participants, nearly half of whom were from Tartu. The summer school taught general skills needed in digital humanities, and the plenaries demonstrated how modern linguistics connects with adjacent disciplines. By the end of this year, in addition to the summer school, MEDAL has also organized seven professional and transferable skills trainings, a large part of which has also been possible to participate in online. Keep an eye out for MEDAL's upcoming events.

The leader of MEDAL is the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics of the University of Tartu, and the consortium also includes partners from the Netherlands (Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in Nijmegen) and the United Kingdom (University of Birmingham). The project is financed by the European Commission through the Twinning measure.

The MEDAL work group includes: Virve-Anneli Vihman (project manager), Joshua Wilbur, Liina Lindström, Taavi Vanaveski (project manager and coordinator), and the project research group also includes Mari Aigro, Pärtel Lippus, Maarja-Liisa Pilvik and Piia Taremaa.

The Project of the Year title recognizes an undertaking that deserves to be highlighted or a project that has a broad scientific, societal or sectoral impact.