Workshop on Sociolinguistic Archive Preparation

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

For nearly five decades sociolinguists and dialectologists have studied the differences in pronunciation, word choice and grammar as correlated with the demographics and attitudes of the speakers and the situations in which they find themselves. This work has important implications for society, education, politics, technology development and forensics. Sociolinguists routinely produce recordings of natural speech, variously transcribed and quantitatively analyzed for dialect features plus careful descriptions of the speakers' characteristics and the interview situation. These data have important potential for linguists, scholars in language related fields and computer scientists developing human language technologies. Although many sociolinguists are eager to share their work, there have been impediments to such sharing. The proposed workshop will address two of the most important. First, within the United States, an Institutional Review Board (IRB) must approve any research involving human subjects. The vast majority of sociolinguistic research involves extremely low risk, and potentially high social benefit particularly for minority communities, but no common body of practice exists for permitting data to be shared. Nor is there a common body of practice with respect to the demographic, attitudinal and situational information collected, complicating sharing and comparison across studies. The workshop will gather leading sociolinguists and dialectologists, and other field researchers with extensive experience, to develop common practice in preparing for institutional review and sharing of data. Expected outcomes are a sketch of an IRB protocol and demographic, attitudinal and situational questionnaires, each containing a core set that scholars should collect for every subject as well as a larger set whose relevance will depend upon the interview itself. The Linguistic Society of America and the Linguistic Data Consortium will publish the protocol and modules on their web sites and announce them via their newsletters and mailing lists, which reach more than 8000 scholars worldwide.