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Language Identifying Codes: Remaining Issues, Future Prospects
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Linguistic scholarship in the data-driven 21st century
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Abstract:
Linguistic scholarship in the data‐driven 21st century Two important forces have been acting on the discipline of linguistics since late in the twentieth century: technological changes which allow the capture and dissemination of high quality multimedia data efficiently and at a reasonable cost, and an emphasis on the collection of primary data as a response to deep concerns about the reduction of linguistic diversity across the world. The convergence and interaction of these two forces is driving changes to scholarly practice in the discipline. With an organisation such as PARADISEC celebrating its tenth anniversary, we can identify some aspects of those changes which are stabilising and it is therefore possible to speculate in an informed fashion about what linguistic scholarship will look like in the coming decades and to consider the implications. In this paper, we will argue that there are implications for technical infrastructure which are being addressed at least to some extent, but that the implications for the social infrastructure of our discipline, particularly channels of dissemination for scholarly work, are much more profound and are not yet being adequately addressed. We suggest that 21st century linguistics will be increasingly based on access to primary data. By this we mean access at all stages of the process of scholarship: access to shared data in well‐organised repositories as well as the possibility of directly citing data in our publications. The infrastructure for archiving exists (witness PARADISEC); additional elements such as servers which allow clients to address specified segments of media files on demand are being discussed and developed (RNLD List April 2013). On the other hand, the less tangible infrastructure to support these changes is not yet so prominent. Direct citation of primary data means moving fully to electronic publishing; by this we mean not merely making work available online in a format such as pdf, but reconceptualising our forms of scholarly communication as essentially freed from text on paper. This in turn implies a reworking of the systems of gate‐keeping and prestige which are associated with the current publication models, and such changes must also include the recognition of the deposit of properly curated data as an accepted part of scholarship. Moves in these directions have begun: last year saw the appearance of a volume devoted to the topic of electronic grammaticography (Nordhoff 2012), and the Australia Linguistic Society is engaged in a dialogue with the Australia Research Council about the recognition of data deposits as research outputs (Thieberger, Margetts, Morey, Musgrave and Schembri 2012). We suggest that the benefits of a linguistics which is closely linked to primary data are evident and moves in this direction are therefore inevitable. But the concomitant changes to the institutional structures of scholarship will be profound and complex. References: Nordhoff, Sebastian (ed.). 2012. Electronic Grammaticography. Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press. Thieberger, Nick, Anna Margetts, Stephen Morey, Simon Musgrave and Adam Schembri. 2012. Assessing curated corpora as research output. Paper presented to the 2012 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, University of Western Australia, November 2012.
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/9847
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