Data in the Study of Variation and Change

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

“…Here, I build on my recent comments in Kendall (2013a) in two areas: considering the time frames of data preservation (Section ) and the importance of open, non‐proprietary file formats (Section ). Again, these are not meant to be an exhaustive set of topics of importance for data portability , but rather my goal is to dig deeper into just two areas where the recent literature (e.g., Bird and Simons ; Goldman et al ; Austin ; Kretzschmar et al ; Kendall , ; Schilling , ch. 6) has had important things to say but which still have much room for further interrogation.…”

“…Labov et al ), to name just a few), but it seems to be becoming fairly common practice in sociolinguistics to refer to even our small data collections as ‘corpora’ or ‘databases’ using proper names to describe them in our research (e.g., the fictitious Corpus of Oregonian English ). I will argue that quite often, these ‘corpora’ are not corpora in the sense that corpus linguists use the term – publically accessible, large, machine‐readable resources (see McEnery and Wilson ; Kendall , ). This is fine – of course – as terms are just terms and different (sub‐)disciplines can use terms differently, but the practice of naming small datasets can be misleading, especially if those data are not shareable or accessible by others.…”

“…These three elements – what I label here respectively the portability problem (after Bird and Simons , see also Kendall ), the access and security problem , and the discoverability and relevance problem – are far from exhaustive, and I do not intend to imply that these are the most important issues in data management, archiving, and sharing (see the many of contributions to this special issue for many other important issues). I do believe that these three problem areas are generally under‐addressed in the literature, including in my recent publications on the subject (Kendall , , ), and therefore warrant some specific attention here. I end in Section with some closing thoughts on data management and preservation in sociolinguistics.…”