The Vindaloo Agenda

[Jeff Good]

Hello,

I want to give my own thoughts on some of the things Heidi brought up.

> The first step should be to figure out what our options are. The
> publisher's
> room, a room of our own where we do demos all day, a half-day
> workshop...?
> Does anyone already know what the range of possible formats might be
> at an LSA meeting? Or Gary & Steven, could you remember roughly what it
> cost to do the OLAC room, and how well that went?  We should have some
> clues about what we'd like to do before March, probably, to be sure
> we really meet the LSA deadlines (which always seem shockingly early
> to me.)

Several options were brought up, and these are the ones I remember:

1. A "symposium", a.k.a. organized session, which had a deadline of
abstract submission of April 15 this year. I think, in general, this
was not thought to be the option of choice (or, at least, the only way
to go) since it would not generate much traffic. This shouldn't cost
anything extra.

2. A pre-conference meeting before the official LSA conference begins.
This could probably be done under the partial auspices of the LSA, but,
presumably, we'd have to pay for the room ahead of time. The 1999(?)
proto-OLAC meeting did something like this, and, apparently, attendance
was good.

3. A LinguistList style room and "office hours". I don't know if this
costs anything or if the LSA just gives Linguist a spare room. The
disadvantage to this is that we'd be sequestered and people would have
to come find us (we could, perhaps, alleviate this somewhat by teaming
up with Linguist and sharing a room).

4. Space in a high-traffic area, like the publisher's room. Publishers
pay to be in that room--but maybe the LSA would let us do it free of
charge?

Option 1 has a clear deadline, option 2 will require some planning to
make sure a room is reserved--and we might need to get money from
somewhere, too. If people like the idea of option 3, we should get in
touch with the Linguist people who take care of these things and see
how to proceed. For option 4, I'd recommend getting in touch with the
LSA early in 2004---after the 2004 conference but not too much after.
We should probably send out an initial note to them around then anyway
to get general advice.

> Did we agree on a general notion of what the range and depth of these
> docs should be? For example, would we want a mini-PowerPoint doc on the
> OLAC Role element (which I happen to have), or is that too narrow a
> topic?

We didn't agree on this. However, my own inclination is that nothing is
too small. Since I don't think we'll be flooded with PowerPoint
presentations, anything and everything would work. In the case of your
mini-presentation, someone might be able to use it alone or incorporate
it into a larger presentation. Are there other thoughts?

> We could use a very superficial level doc explaining what it's all
> about: briefly, shallowly, what OLAC is and what it's good for, aimed
> at the 95% of our audience who won't care how any of it works.

That's a good point. I wonder if there's anything like this out there
to build on. (Steven, if you're out there, do you know if there is such
a thing already? I can't think of one off the top of my head.)

> I'll volunteer to write something, and I promise to actually produce
> it in a reasonable time :-). (I'm designating August as writing
> catch-up month, since everyone else associated with AILLA will be
> gone all month.) Maybe I could help with the markup one? Assuming
> that means something like an overview of OLAC metadata for field

I was thinking of dividing up "markup" from the OLAC fields.
Specifically, I thought we could use a few-page intro to the idea of
markup in general--this would allow us to separate the complications of
markup and XML from the logical issue of the fields OLAC employs.

But a document going over the metadata fields which are part of the
OLAC standard is also needed (preferably with lots of real-world
examples). Specifically, I think a document which barely mentions
Dublin Core or the idea of "extensions" but just says: these are the
fields you have, and this is the sort of thing OLAC things should go
into them. Would you like to write something like this Heidi? It is
probably best written by someone who has to actively categorize things
with metadata.

Jeff
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 4410 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/olac-outreach/attachments/20030727/e2ccea05/attachment.bin>