Archiving and Managing Sociolinguistic Data: The Problems of Portability, Access and Security, and Discoverability and Relevance

Abstract

In recent years, sociolinguists have become increasingly focused on and more explicit about ensuring the preservation, and accessibility, of their data. This increased focus on our data has involved new lines of work explicitly on data management and, in turn, has led to important (re)considerations of the nature of sociolinguistic data and the metadata of importance for sociolinguist research. While many of the papers in this special issue focus on issues having to do with specific metadata, in this paper, I consider archiving and sharing data more generally. I attend to three specific problem areas, portability access and security, and discoverability and relevance, providing advice as well as some 'food for thought' discussions for each.

Age: Methods and Metadata

“…However age is elicited, though, it needs to be recorded in such a way that it can be retrieved easily by anyone who analyzes the linguistic data that it is associated with. Following Kendall's (this volume) suggestion, stored electronic data relating to age needs to be kept in an easily readable plain text format (that is, it needs to be stored in a format that can be opened in a plain text reader and that can be parsed by someone unfamiliar with the conventions used to build the file once it is opened). To that end, abbreviations should be avoided – although it may be obvious when metadata is put together that BY: 1950 means that the birth year of the speaker is 1950, it might not be obvious to someone else, or in fact to the researcher who put together the metadata after the passage of some time.…”