A query...

[Miriam Meyerhoff]

At the risk of returning this discussion to general topics of 
discussion (rather than personal proclamations of what outstandingly 
caring and responsible researchers we are as individuals -- of course 
we are, this is Funknet, right? -- and whether or not untenured 
members of our community are or are not paranoid about how much time 
they ought to spend on peer-reviewed papers vs creating web-based 
archives) ...

I was interested in the off-hand way in which the emergence of 
different archiving systems was glossed over in the debate. Someone 
(Dan Everett, I believe -- forgive me if I am misattributing, the 
thread was very long by the time I joined it) made some comment to 
the effect that they would prefer it if funding were given to 
thoroughly document (and archive through to public access) fewer 
languages than to document in less open archives a larger number of 
languages.

I'm interested by this for several reasons. One is that I have 
started to get the impression that the very limited NSF funding for 
linguistics is doubling-up on different archiving systems. My own 
area of research is sociolinguistics, and I am dismayed when I see 
funding going on digitising different sociolinguistics archives to 
different standards when so much basic research in sociolinguistics 
is left unfunded. We have standards or systems emerging in North 
Carolina, Philadelphia, to say nothing of the International Corpora 
of English which do not (sadly) all adhere to the same mark-up norms. 
In Oceanic linguistics (my other research interest) there is the 
excellent PARADISEC archive which has been set up, but the 
discussants on this list are clearly thinking of many others, and 
Helen Dry and Anthony Aristar have been trying to lead with archiving 
and mark-up standards for years.

Is it being too unbearably cynical to suggest that people are 
pursuing their own archive projects because this suits the current 
priorities/worries of funding agencies (and, not coincidentally, 
enhances our own professional standing or mana), rather than because 
it best serves the immediate and long-term goals fo the user groups 
(whether speakers of these languages or linguists)?

The example of the Jesuit grammars was raised early in the piece -- I 
have no experience whatsoever with these, so I will simply take it as 
writ that they are exemplary -- but surely these guys did not have a 
standardised format that they presented data in? If they did, or to 
the extent that they did, surely the standard was something more like 
the "archiving" standard adopted by Malcolm Ross, Andy Pawley and 
Darrell Tryon at Pacific Linguistics years ago: if you go to a 
Pacific Linguistics grammar now, you know what to expect to find in 
section 4.3.2 and you know what to expect to find in section 4.3.2.1. 
etc. etc.

No, I know we don't have easy access to the authors' original 
notebooks or recordings in all cases so we can't check where they 
have perhaps made honest category errors (though -- by the way -- 
PARADISEC does make written records and recordings available...). But 
notebooks are bloody good ways of archiving data (Peter Ladefoged's 
name has been invoked in this discussion and he was quite clear in 
the last few years that hard copy is absolutely essential for 
sustaining further research). And yes, I agree that there are some 
things we can and should be more forthcoming about sharing with the 
academic community more widely. But I'm sorry, people, the recording 
of the woman telling me about her rape -- you can't have that. Not 
because I promised her the conversation was private, but because it 
is quite simply not my story to share. But sure, the argument about 
who should have won the beauty contest ... when I have time, because 
she understood the recordings would be used for academic research. 
But I hope that is not time that is funded at the expense of some 
energetic, and fresh-minded new researcher in the field, whose work 
will challenge me and mine.

In short... my point is: I disagree the idea that the extremely 
limited funding to linguistics should go principally to projects 
feeding labour-intensive digital archiving. Yes, it would be lovely 
if there were more  and larger grants in linguistics so we didn't 
have to make this kind of choice. But at the moment we do and I think 
we would be doing our community a dis-service if we backed the Big 
Few at the expense of the Small Many.

And no, I have nothing to do with PARADISEC, but their web page is 
here if you don't know about their enterprise and would like to learn 
more: http://paradisec.org.au/

best,  Miriam
-- 
Miriam Meyerhoff
Professor of Sociolinguistics
Linguistics & English Language
University of Edinburgh
14 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh EH8 9LN
SCOTLAND

ph.: +44 131 650-3961/3628 (main office) or 651-1836 (direct line)
fax: +44 131 650-6883

http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~mhoff