data sharing

SSWL (Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages)

Submitted by Chris Collins on Thu, 11/10/2011 - 00:07

SSWL (Syntactic Structure of the World's Languages) is a open-ended database of syntactic, morphological and semantic properties. Each language is characterized by a set of property-value pairs (e.g., Object Verb: Yes), and examples that illustrate these property value pairs. A rich variety of search functions are available, as well as mapping and the creation of similarity trees. The database is open-ended in the sense that (a) new language experts may sign up to add new languages, and (b) new properties may be added.

Liberman on Open Access and the three-legged stool

Submitted by Emily M. Bender on Wed, 11/09/2011 - 22:41

This post over at Language Log is highly recommended. A quick excerpt:

“reproducible research” [...] requires three things: (1) the data sets that serve as input; (2) the programs needed to run the experiment; and (3) a comprehensible account of what the experiment does, why it matters, and what the results are.

This is from Mark Liberman's abstract for his talk at the Berlin 9 Open Access Conference taking place in Maryland (not Berlin).

Conference on Science and the Internet 2012

Submitted by Emily M. Bender on Thu, 10/13/2011 - 12:00

From the call for papers:

Online media have brought about numerous changes in scholarly practices, including, but not limited to gathering data, finding relevant literature, making research and results accessible, organising collaboration, communicating with colleagues and students as well as creating fruitful learning environments.

New book on language variation infrastructure

Submitted by Janne Bondi Johan... on Wed, 10/05/2011 - 13:34

Dear colleagues,

You may want to learn about the book "Language Variation Infrastructure. Papers on selected projects" (2011) based on some talks from Workshop on research infrastructure for linguistic variation (RiLiVS) arranged at the University of Oslo. I think most of you will find the papers interesting.

The book is freely downloadable from the web site of the OSLA Oslo Studies in Language:
https://www.journals.uio.no/index.php/osla/issue/view/6
You can choose to download the whole book or just individual chapters.

This is the list of contents:

Adapting a Scientific Workflow Infrastructure to Linguistics

Submitted by Richard Littauer on Thu, 09/29/2011 - 11:10

In Linguistics (and similar social sciences), there are no standard 'workflow workbenches' that can be used for non-programmers to develop, use, and share their workflows. However, as an increasingly data-intensive science, computational linguists are using computational pipelines in their research, in order to facilitate their main work.

Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age

Submitted by Jeff Good on Tue, 08/30/2011 - 15:26

The National Science Foundation has posted a workshop report entitled Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age. While it doesn't appear to contain direct input from linguists, many of the issues it discusses will be familiar to those interested in promoting a cyberlinguistics infrastructure.

From the executive summary:

RELISH-Symposium „Rendering Endangered Lexicons Interoperable through Standards Harmonization”, Frankfurt, October 10, 2011 “RELISH meets LOEWE”

Submitted by Irina Nevskaya on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 10:31

The RELISH project promotes language-oriented research by addressing a two-pronged problem: (1) the lack of harmonization between digital standards for lexical information in Europe and America, and (2) the lack of interoperability among existing lexicons of endangered languages, in particular those created with the Shoebox lexicon building software. The cooperation partners in the RELISH project are the University of Frankfurt (FRA), the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI), and Eastern Michigan University, the host of the Linguist List (ILIT).

"Linked Data in Linguistics" at DGfS 2012

Submitted by Sebastian Nordhoff on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 03:50

Linked Data in Linguistics
Linguists from all disciplines produce more and more data and share the challenge how to make this data accessible to other researchers in their field and beyond. This does not only concern the general availability of data, but also the representation of the structure of the data. Linked Data is one paradigm which can be employed to tackle this task.
We are happy to announce the workshop "Linked Data in Linguistics" at the annual meeting of the German Linguistic Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS) taking place March 7-9, 2012 in Frankfurt a.M., Germany.

Access to lexical databases: discussion

Submitted by Emily M. Bender on Tue, 05/17/2011 - 20:10

Claire Bowern has started a discussion on her blog, Anggarrgoon, about access to aggregated lexical data: how to protect the rights of the various stake holders while encouraging as much sharing as possible. I enjoyed her tongue-in-cheek suggestion that linguist-contributors should, in game-theoretic fashion, get access to data in proportion to the data they share.

“Open and shut: Digital repatriation and the circulation of indigenous knowledge”

Submitted by Sharon Hargus on Tue, 04/26/2011 - 14:14

Kimberly (“Kim”) Christer (Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies, Washington State University), an anthropologist by training, presented “Open and shut: Digital repatriation and the circulation of indigenous knowledge” on 4-14-11 at the University of Washington, Seattle campus. With the support of NEH, she is working on the development of the “Mukurtu software tool” (http://www.mukurtuarchive.org/documentation.html), a user-customizable tool for the creation of archives.