A query...

[Claire Bowern]

Mark P. Line wrote:
> Andrew Koontz-Garboden wrote:
>> I wonder, Dan, what you have to say about the tenure point made by
>> Claire.  Assuming the goal is to achieve the best possible
>> documentation of a language, then we'd definitely like people who have
>> invested tons of time and energy in them to get promoted.  If the
>> kinds of activities you outline actually undermine this goal, then it
>> seems to me that one can't actually argue in favor of them providing
>> the best documentation of a language, since these activities would
>> ultimately lead to the academic demise of young scholars.
> 
> Actually, if tenure decisions are based on antequated and unscientific
> premises, then it must be the case that we can and must argue in favor of
> giving tenure to young scholars who do good science.
> 
> Giving tenure to young scholars who do good science does seem to be a
> concept that has worked fairly well in other fields, so maybe we should
> try it in linguistics. Of course, linguistics is still crawling out of a
> decades-long period during which scientific method had no place in the
> mainstream -- so we're still playing catch-up for time lost.
> 
> Surely we don't have to appease the status quo of tenure decisions if we
> think that status quo is broken. Seems like the tail wagging the dog.
> 
> 

Perhaps a better analogy is that scientists in the natural sciences 
don't get tenure for collecting data, but for what they do with it.

>> Of course, one can say that what needs to be done is to get tenure
>> committees to consider these kinds of activities.  In the short term,
>> though, this doesn't seem like much of a solution---if Claire does
>> what you suggest, odds are really good she won't get tenure, no?  And
>> that would be a very bad thing for the documentation of Bardi...
> 
> I know Claire and I don't intend to pick on her specifically. But I think
> that for as long as tenure decisions do not tend to reward good science,
> any young linguist has to decide for herself if she's more interested in
> tenure or more interested in doing good science. It's not an ethical
> dilemma, just a biographical choice.

It's not that simple at all (and it doesn't just apply to females...) I 
don't think for a minute that what I do is "purely" science - it can't 
be, simply because of the nature of the data and the methodology used to 
collect it. We don't have anything exactly akin to double-blind 
experimentation in descriptive fieldwork. Sure, we do participant 
observation and hypothesis testing on different data-sets, but most 
descriptive fieldwork is not impartially collected. Isn't part of doing 
science seeing where the methodology fails?

And it is an ethical dilemma for anyone who is walking the tight-rope 
between accountability to an academic community and accountability to a 
speech community with very different (and sometimes contradictory) 
expectations.

We're talking about two different things - data accountability, and 
widespread data access. Full accountability of the researcher and 
replicability of results is one thing, and I'd argue that this is one of 
the things which makes any particular piece of research "scientific" 
versus "humanistic". How data are disseminated is another question. In 
the article that started this discussion, for example, the issues wasn't 
that the guy didn't put his data on the web, it's that he fabricated the 
results and then lied about it. If he'd put the fabricated data on the 
web, no one would have been better off.