Satellite Workshop for Archival Preparation

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This award will support a satellite workshop on Archival Preparation to be held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in January, 2016. Under NSF Policy, investigators are expected to make available to other researchers the primary data and physical collections created or gathered under NSF grants. However, the metadata associated with archived data are often inadequate to permit data, e.g. sound files, from related studies to be compared; without an agreed-upon coding protocol, there can be no sharing and comparison across speech corpora. Invited participants will be asked to suggest specific coding conventions for such factors as socioeconomic and educational speaker demographics, and for language choice, stance and footing. Using appropriate metadata for these factors will facilitate sharing of corpora and research to determine how each factor impacts on language use. A previous NSF grant enabled a workshop in which leading scholars discussed data protocols, obtaining ethics board approval for human subject research, and ensuring that the information gathered about human subject demographics, attitudes and the situations in which they were recorded provide enough scope and detail to permit meaningful comparison across studies, and thus encourage data sharing. Following that model, this workshop will extend the topics covered, and provide a training forum in which to develop protocols for sharable data that conform to NSF policy. This award will also support the participation of students in the training and discussions.