American Dialect Society and the integration of small databases

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Thanks to George for providing information about the new RPI database.

This news highlights an excellent opportunity for the American Dialect
Society to take a constructive stance for the facilitation of
linguistic research, in my opinion. Bill Mullins has compiled a
valuable document listing a large number of small text databases.
While the building of these archives is good news the proliferation of
distinct search interfaces is not good news. It impedes research.


These databases should be aggregated in a manner that allows
simultaneous searching. There are several approaches possible to
integrating the databases and/or standardizing the data.


If a respected organization such as the ADS develops a position paper
on this topic it will help.


Some organization has to push for this goal. Maybe the project can be
coordinated by HathiTrust. There should be an ongoing open source
project with solid financial support.


Garson

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