LSA Annual Meeting Albuquerque 2006

[Baden Hughes]

>> IIRC, the post-LSA discussions here suggested a number of things,
>> including a tutorial, some office hours, a demo etc based on this year's
>> activities. I think we need to do something slightly different to this
>
> Yes--you're completely correct. I should have made it clear that I didn't
> intend this planning to preclude planning of other events. The main reason
> to bring this up now is because, for some reason, the LSA has this very
> early deadline for organized session proposals. Most other things, like
> office hours, etc., don't need to be planned until September.
>
> But it clearly makes sense to keep the idea of there being other events in
> mind when we choose a topic since we might find that this choice will
> affect what we'll do elsewhere.

I think it also depends on what we see "OLAC Outreach" as being. If for
example, it is to promote the OLAC metadata set, the creation tools and
information discovery infrastructure, that is quite different to "data
management for linguists".

>> year, for several reasons including to differentiate it from simply being
>> a repeat performance and to account for technology/tool changes, which
>> impact heavily on the "advice" component of the OLAC mission.
>
> I completely agree--by the way, do you (or anyone) see any particular
> technology/tool developments going on that we should address?
> (Will we know what to do with video in 2006, for example?

There's several ideas which strike me as being interesting, video is one
of them with the significant increase in multimodal data capture
associated with fieldwork. There may well be some other OLAC-ish tools
which come out in that timeframe which might warrant discussion, but
they're not necessarily oriented at archiving so much as resource
discovery.

> Do we expect
> the E-MELD workshop on ontologies to result in something that is
> "tutorial" friendly?)

I'm not optimistic about ontologically grounded tools, apart from FIELD
and ELAN emerging in that timeframe. As far as most linguists are
concerned, the ontological engineering exercise is largely removed from
their daily analysis work except possibly by the provision of a list of
linguistic annotation labels. Embedding these in tools is an effort
subsequent to agreeing what they are, how they can be expressed and
standards against which software developers can write code. However, the
important point from archiving is that data should be interpretable, and
so best practice would be to minimally ground the annotation terms in a
corpus prior to archving.

>> I'm planning on doing a short segment at the Australian Linguistics
>> Society in a "data management for linguists" workshop in
>> Melbourne in September. This will be pretty high level as far as content
>> goes, and I haven't thought a lot about the content as yet.
>
> Well, if you want to call it an OLAC Outreach event, I'd have no problem
> with that! More generally, though, do you think the Australian Linguistics
> Society meeting in some future year would be an appropriate venue for an
> Outreach event? We could think about planning one.

ALS isn't on the scale of LSA, but it is the most prominent event locally,
and generally does have a day or two of workshop sessions before and
after. Similarly NZLS, which attracts quite a lot of Pacific linguists.


Baden