LSA Annual Meeting Albuquerque 2006

[Heidi Johnson]

Baden wrote:
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".
----
For me it's all pretty much of a muchness. We want field linguists to
produce materials of lasting value. OLAC is kind of a flag we can
wave to demonstrate our common views on standards and such. It's helpful
for people to have the sense that there is a common framework out
there and that they know what it is (more or less). That's very relevant
for data management, although of course, data must be managed whether
it's going into an archive or not.

But one of the most frequent excuses we hear for not archiving corpora
is that the collector hasn't had time to sort it out (after 20+ years.)
If they had followed good data management practices from the outset, it'd
be archive-ready from the outset!

>> 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.

I have to agree with Baden. Our field linguists get their ontologies the
old-fashioned way: from their professors. Some of our students might be
interested, but it's nowhere near as urgent as knowing what software to
use for transcription and how to use it and then what!!! They want to
spend as little time wrestling technologies as possible so they can
spend more time pondering their morphemes.

Heidi