#lingdata

After five years with the Linguistics Data Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance, I’ve stepped down as a co-chair of the group. I wanted to use this as a chance to collate some of the work I was involved with over the last five years. I’ll still be a member of the LDIG for its next chapter, and thrilled that Andrea Berez-Kroeker, Helene N. Andreassen, and Lindsay Ferrara will be heading things up. And, of course, the group has many excellent members (if you’re a linguist and/or interested in data management, you can join the LDIG too!).

The Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics

The Austin Principles of Data Citation were the first major output for the LDIG, it focuses on the why of data citation. This short document is a position statement on the importance of data in linguistic work. From the preamble:

Data is central to empirical linguistic research. Linguistic data comes in many different forms, and is collected and processed with a wide range of methods. Data citation recognizes the centrality of data to research. Furthermore, it facilitates verification of claims and repurposing of data for other studies.

The official Austin Principles website

The Superlinguo post

The Trømso Recommendations in academic publishing

If the Austin Principles are the why the Tromsø Recommendations are the how.

TheTromsø Recommendations provide clear guidance for data citation for referencing language data, both in the bibliography and in the text of linguistics publications. The recommendations have been written to account for the rich variety of linguistic data, and include clear guidance and examples.

The official Tromsø Recommendations documents

The Superlinguo post

Building uptake for the Trømso Recommendations

Now that the Tromsø Recommendations have been published, there’s an ongoing campaign to normalise their use in academic publishing and grant writing. Get involved by encouraging your favourite publishers to include to Tromsø Recommendations in their author guidelines!

The Linguistics Data Interest Group (a working group in the Research Data Alliance) have developed the Tromsø Recommendations in collaboration with linguists working in a range of disciplines. The next step is to help encourage citation of data by encouraging journals to include the Tromsø Recommendations in their instructions for authors.

bit.ly/trecs-campaign

Publications

Alongside LDIG colleagues I was involved in a number of publications looking at the role of data in linguistics. Below are links to the Superlinguo posts with more information, the abstract and links to open access versions.

• Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field
  
• Situating Linguistics in the Social Science Data Movement. Chapter in the Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management
• Data transparency and citation in the journal Gesture
  
• Reflections on reproducible research, in Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998
• Putting practice into words: The state of data and methods transparency in grammatical descriptions
  

See also:The Superlinguo lingdata tag.

Suzy Styles is one of my favourite people to talk to about research data, the importance of transparency in research methods, and how we can always do things better. So when the editors of the Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management invited us to submit a chapter about the things linguists can learn about data management from discussions in other fields of social science (particularly experimental psychology), I was so excited to sit down with Suzy and bring together everything I’ve learnt in the last few years of our discussions.

Linguists spend a lot of time working with data, but we do not always give much thought to the role that data plays in building the larger research culture in our field. We can learn a lot about good data management in our own discipline by learning from what is happening in related fields, both in terms of innovations and new benchmarks, as well as when things have not gone right. We look at how data have been conceptualized and managed in other areas of the social sciences, particularly social psychology, and how current attitudes are shaping the future of research. The fundamental theme of this discourse is the centrality of openness, both in terms of transparency of methodology and making primary data more accessible to people beyond the original researchers. This move toward open research aims to reduce biases, both for individual researchers and for the discipline, and encourages more considered data collection and presentation.

Reference

Gawne, L. & S. Styles. 2022. Situating linguistics in the social science data movement. In A.L. Berez-Kroeker, B. McDonnell, E. Koller & L.B. Collister (Eds), The Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management, 9-25. MIT Press. doi: 10.7551/mitpress/12200.003.0006[Open Access PDF]

Other resources

• The handbook is completely Open Access, the other 55 chapters are available here
• Free Open Access companion course covering the first 13 chapters (including ours)
  

See also:

• Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field(article)
  
• The Tromsø Recommendations
  
• The Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics
• Data transparency and citation in the journal Gesture(article)
• Putting practice into words:  The state of data and methods transparency in grammatical descriptions(article)
  
• Reflections on reproducible research, in Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998(article)