Inés Olza and Cristóbal Pagan, researchers from the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra, participated in the Google Summer of Code program. They were present as members of the international Red Hen Lab Consortium for the Study of Multimodal Communication, which brings together experts from more than 15 universities from different countries like the United States, Spain, Germany, Brazil and Norway.

Specifically, Olza and Pagan, who work within ICS's Public Discourse project, contributed to overseeing Ekaterina Ageeva's project, which was designed to detect and automatically tag multi-verbal linguistic expressions. In addition to this project, four young professionals collaborated with Red Hen Lab on projects that are also linked to digital humanities, computational linguistics and the development of freely available tools.

The Google Summer of Code is a global program that awards scholarships to young computer techs around the world to collaborate with institutions, research groups and companies involved in developing code for freely available tools. The Google Summer of Code selects mentor institutions that present projects that computer techs can collaborate on.

Newscape, a vast library of television news

Red Hen Lab's project consisted in developing tools for automatic text (natural language processing), sound and image processing to be incorporated into its international TV news library called NewsScape.

This database is a huge corpus of spoken language that allows for the study of all multimodal aspects (gesture, prosody, images and sounds that accompany speech, television production effects, etc.) It is therefore an unprecedented tool that could revolutionize the study of speech and news coverage.

It currently contains more than 250,000 hours of television news in English, Spanish and other European languages and it incorporates an automatic search tool. For example, NewsScape allows one to compare the treatment of a subject on different channels and programs searching by keywords in their subtitles.

With regard to the collection of news in Spanish, it is currently the largest existing resource for the study of spoken Spanish with some 6,000 hours of television recordings and 40 million synchronized subtitles.