LINGUIST List Special Issue: Fund Drive - Win a Book!

Thu Mar 31 20:12:11 UTC 2011

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
	 Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin-Madison
	 Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
	 Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
         <reviews at linguistlist.org>  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

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and donations from subscribers and publishers.

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thur, 31 Mar 2011 10:43:01
From:  linguist [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Win a Book from Georgetown University Press!

Dear Subscribers,

Georgetown University Press has three books
that will be given to the next three people
to donate any amount!

Georgetown University Press wants to help
LINGUIST List during this year's Fund Drive
in order to reach it goal.

Help LINGUIST List by donating and get a
great new title from Georgetown University
Press!

Donate at:
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

The LINGUIST Crew

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thur, 31 Mar 2011 12:26:56
From:  linguist [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: MultiTree Project Update

Dear LINGUIST List subscribers,

The MultiTree project (http://multitree.org/), a digital library of 
language relationship hypotheses, has been supported through your 
donations since 2008. These donations are greatly appreciated, because 
they have allowed students such as myself to work on this project and 
if you donate this year, the work we.re doing will continue:

http://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Each student on MultiTree is given language families to focus on, 
which means that we correspond with preeminent historical linguists 
specializing in those families. We then search for the hypotheses 
that are suggested by the specialists as well as find more on our 
own. This research is used to present our users with a range of 
hypotheses while highlighting the most accepted hypotheses in our 
composite trees.

Through these efforts, the MultiTree library has grown to include 1,092 
language family trees that are freely available to the public. Our 
hyperbolic tree viewer allows one to pull subgroups and languages into 
the foreground and view a whole tree, making it possible to view huge 
language families such as Niger-Congo. The public may also download, 
comment on, and compare the trees within the library. 

The comparison feature's ability to display two hypotheses in the same 
browser window is an important feature in our discipline, where hypotheses 
for languages families can vary greatly depending on the specialist and 
the time period in which they were written. In addition to providing 
these hypotheses in accessible format, MultiTree offers an impressive 
bibliography of sources for those who are interested in learning more 
about a particular family.

We've accomplished a lot so far, but there's still so much more that 
we hope to offer in the future. As we continue adding hypotheses into 
the library, we also want to make improvements to the site, such as 
building an enhanced commenting facility that will hopefully lead to 
fruitful discussion between specialists, students, and other interested 
communities. We'd also like to make our full bibliography available for 
downloading.

The continued development and maintenance of MultiTree (http://multitree.org/) 
can only happen with your ongoing support. Please donate today to ensure 
that this resource is available for all to use and to help students like 
me continue to work on this valuable resource:

https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Thank you so much for your continued support of The LINGUIST List and 
MultiTree.

Kind regards,

Danielle St. Jean
MultiTree Editor
The LINGUIST List 