Digital Tools Summit/Linguistics

[Emily M. Bender]

This version should be legible.
-Emily

    DT-Summit/Linguistics: A Digital Tools Summit for Linguistics
	      22-23 June 2006, Michigan State University

			   Call for Papers

		       Deadline:  31 March 2006

The DTS-L (Digital Tools Summit for Linguistics, http://www.ku.edu/pri/DTSL/) 
is a one-time workshop on digital tools and cyberinfrastructure
development in linguistics, for language software engineers and
computational linguists, as well as linguists. The workshop aims to
facilitate new interdisciplinary collaboration to design and create
digital tools specifically for linguistic analysis, and thereby
stimulate new funding initiatives. During the workshop, participants
will prioritize and draft tools and data structures. They will work
largely in interest groups (e.g. in data annotation, migration,
visualization, and resource interoperation) and for each interest area
will prepare design sketches of and implementation plans for at least
one tool.  We particularly want to address the needs of
non-technologically-oriented language researchers, simulating the
development of truly useful, stable, cross-platform, open-source tools
that are both small (e.g. Unicode conversion scripts) and large
(e.g. a modular suite of linguistic data- analysis tools) in scope.

	   The Summit will take place June 22-23, 2006 at Michigan State
University, in association with both the summer Linguistic Society of
America meeting (http://www.lsadc.org/info/meet- summer06-cfp.cfm) and
the E-MELD [Electronic Metastructures for Endangered Language Data]
meeting ("Tools and Standards: The State of the Art,"
http://emeld.org/workshop/2006/); DTS-L and E-MELD will meet together
on the morning of 22 June.

	We encourage submissions from Indigenous/First Nations
language workers and graduate students, for whom a limited number of
travel and housing subsidies will be available, pending funding.

 Selection

Participants will not submit abstracts or make individual oral
presentations of their own projects.  Instead, since this summit is
based on discussions in small working groups, participants are
requested to submit one-page issue statements, which will form the
basis for the working group themes for the first conference day. In
these issue statements, we urge applicants to present one issue or
idea which would serve to improve linguistic scholarship. Submissions
should consider and explicate one or more of the following issues:

1. What are the most pressing needs among possible cyberinfrastructure 
      and/or digital tools for linguistics?
2. What are some enduring challenges in creating cyberinfrastructure 
      and/or digital tools for linguistics?
3. Which existing resources can be leveraged to create digital tools 
      for linguistics? 
4. How can documentation tools make language resources (e.g. text, 
      lexical or morphological corpora) more readily available for 
      historical, typological, and other theoretical analyses?  

Each issue paper must be accompanied by a short (half page or less) biography. 

Submissions address: pri at ku.edu
Deadline:            Issue statements and biographies are due on 31 March 2006 
Length: 	     Issue statements: one page. Biographies: one half-page.