Linguistic Data Management

Abstract

Documenting a language requires the production of records that will persist and be accessible into the future. If we look at the number of language descriptions for which there is no corresponding accessible primary data, it would seem that creating persistent, well-structured, and citable language records has proven to be a considerable barrier to linguists in the past.2 This is due, in part, to the lack of advice and training in the use of appropriate methods and tools for recording, transcribing, and analyzing linguistic data. This chapter seeks to provide such advice by focusing on the nuts and bolts of the creation and management of sustainable data in the course of linguistic field research, including pre-fieldwork planning and the follow-up archiving, annotation, and analysis of field-collected materials. The approach to data management presented here assumes that it is the 1 Thanks to Christopher Cox and Toshihide Nakayama for their comments as reviewers of this chapter. Thanks also to Laura Berbusse, Tobias Bloyd, and Aaron Waldrip for helpful suggestions. 2 See Johnston (1995) and Antworth and Valentine (1998) and the other papers (a little dated but still useful) in Lawler and Aristar-Dry (1998) to see how these topics have been part of linguistic discussion for some time.

The Linguistic Data Life Cycle, Sustainability of Data, and Principles of Solid Data Management

“…We regularly encounter this recommendation in library guidance, framed as the 3-2-1 rule (three copies; in two different storage media; with at least one off-site copy). 14 In the linguistics community, Thieberger and Berez (2012) address the importance of backups in research, offering different strategies for creating copies. For linguists doing fieldwork, they suggest that external hard drives, cloud storage, and USB "on-the-go" devices can all be good backup strategies, depending on the circumstances in the field (99-100).…”

The Scope of Linguistic Data

“…Alongside considerations of what kinds of events to record, a central concern of documentary linguistics has been the mechanics of data collection, as evidenced by work on data management (e.g., Austin 2006;Good 2011;Thieberger & Berez 2012) or audio and video recording techniques (e.g., Margetts & Margetts 2012). An important recent development in documentary linguistics has been increased attention on the collection of video data (see, instances, the textual representations are seen as secondary representations of some other kind of primary data, as is typically the case in language documentation (see section 2.2).…”

Documentary Linguistics: Methodological Challenges and Innovatory Responses

“…Documentation can take many forms and, as I have emphasized here, there is a multiplier effect in building records properly with sufficient description to allow them to be retrieved and reused. Multiple possible output formats can be derived from the same primary records, for online access, or via portable devices and mobile phones, in addition to books of narratives or dictionaries as discussed in Thieberger and Berez (2012).…”