[Tibeto-burman-linguistics] new data on Kusunda

Tue Sep 24 18:53:47 UTC 2019

Mark Post is correct: My clarification was based on the “published their
data” language used by Nathan in the original email. It struck me as
odd.  Some of the references noted in the email exchanges are not even in
.pdf references in the report.

There are couple of other things in Nathan’s more recent response (and I
say this from a stance of great respect for his work) that I wanted to
comment on more broadly, although I am aware that this list-serv is not
really the appropriate place to get bogged down in this, and it is not
really a place for personal quibbles, so I’ll make my comments and then
drop it:

1. To quote Nathan: “The information in a publication cannot be verified
unless the data is released.”

If this is understood as categorically true, there is a risk of nullifying
some of the most important published works in our field. Even if one has
access to sound and video files and field notes through a data set
publication or release, there are still potentially matters of contention
and debate in a description or analysis. Even field notebooks (the standard
piece of documentation equipment in the event that recorders are not
available) are ultimately a derived representation of actual language use.
Not everything in linguistic analysis is subject to instrumental
verification or can easily be “check(ed) (for) accuracy.” Publications that
do not have a companion full data-set (that is publicly available) can
still be extremely valuable (for example, many of the exhaustive reference
grammars written and published before the advent of online, public
repositories, or even based on impressionistic researcher observations when
recording equipment was hard to come by, and what ultimately makes it into
a grammar is still probably just a sliver of what the researcher acquired
by whatever means in their fieldwork). That is (hopefully) what a strong
methodology section in the publication, and also the peer review process
help to ensure.

2. “As for Donohue, why he is so reluctant to publish his data is a mystery
to me, despite having me asked him myself this question….”

I don’t think this is appropriate or fair—as I noted above, there are (and
have been) many valuable descriptive and analytical contributions in our
field in which the entire data set is not publicly stored in an archive or
repository. If we want to call out one individual for a reluctance or
inability (or whatever) to put everything into some online repository, then
we should also call out any other field researcher who has gathered data
recently who has also not fully released all materials (I guess I would be
one of those people, too!)…. I’m not comfortable with that. If scholars
decide, for example, that they don’t want to trust Mark’s or David’s
published descriptions and analyses because there is no companion data-set
available, then that is their own call, and we can also be grateful for the
presence of Tim and Uday’s materials.

3. “When the public funds research, it is a mystery to me why researchers
do not want the public to check the accuracy of their work and build upon
it…”

Actually, I’m the President of the Endangered Language Fund, which partly
supported Uday and Tim’s work on Kusunda. We are not a “public fund”
(funded by taxes) in the same way that a U.S. federal agency like the NSF
or NEH are, or that AHRC or ESRC are in the United Kingdom. ELF grants do
require archiving of the material collected by our funded work, *but it
does not have to be publicly available*. That is a decision that the
community makes in communication and partnership with the researchers. And,
a community and researcher can even decide to keep some/most/all of a
corpus private but still allow publications on aspects of that language,
using selected examples or pieces.

ELF offers its grant awardees three levels of access to materials: Public,
ELF-internal for administrative and reporting purposes only, and a 5 year
embargo in which internal will transition to public (NSF offers similar
options). I cannot speak for what the donors on their GoFundMe campagin did
or did not want. In the case of Tim and Uday, the data found in the Zenodo
repository all look to be fully accessible to whomever wants to use them,
and for whatever purposes. And, although I myself have never made use of it
for my own materials, Zenodo looks to be a trustworthy and sustainably
managed repository, which satisfies the needs of ELF. That’s all fine, and
we understand this to be a reflection of an agreement between them and the
(participating) Kusunda community (or the remaining representatives, since
it is moribund). But not all communities want to have collected materials
available to the public in the same ways, and as researchers, we should
also respect that. Furthermore, not all people who are interested in
documenting their/a language have access to the same types of resources or
knowledge about places to put data. Things are starting to change, and I
think that the research community can play a leading role in being the
change that we want to see, but it has to be done in a way that respects
the integrity and desires of the speech community and is open and
encouraging to scholars and those relationships.

In the end, I’m grateful that Nathan shared Tim and Uday’s report, which
has all of these links to valuable materials. Also, I am not ignorant of
the bigger concerns here: Kusunda is almost vanished. Despite Tim and
Uday’s valuable data and Mark and co-authors and David’s valuable
publications, there is still much we don’t know about this important
isolate spoken in the midst of so many Indo-European and Tibeto-Burman
languages. And, having benefitted from, and having served the NSF in
various ways (and now serving for ELF), I am a strong advocate for
researchers making use of archival storage and standard metadata encoding
schemes and for ethically sharing whatever can be shared. And in fact,
University of California’s e-Scholarship publishing platform (on which
*Himalayan
Linguistics* is hosted) is also in the planning stages of their own
data-set repository feature, which will have a certain level of peer
review, and I think it will be a great addition to introduce to the journal
in the near future. I am happy to see these approaches and standards being
used more and more for the languages of the region. But it is not a
one-size-fits-all situation, in my opinion.

Thank you, all,

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 10:58 PM Mark W. Post <markwpost at gmail.com> wrote:

> No, what you said is that "neither of them *published* their data". Hence
> the misunderstanding.
>
> ------ Original Message ------
> From: "Nathan Hill" <nh36 at soas.ac.uk>
> To: "Kristine Hildebrandt" <khildeb at siue.edu>
> Cc: "tibeto-burman-linguistics" <
> tibeto-burman-linguistics at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> Sent: 24/09/2019 12:08:24 AM
> Subject: Re: [Tibeto-burman-linguistics] new data on Kusunda
>
> Dear All,
>
> Since my statement has required two "clarifications," let me clarify that
> I said that neither Watters or Donohue had released their DATA. The
> information in a publication cannot be verified unless the DATA is
> released. Also, it is very hard for new research to be done on a language
> if there is not DATA available. Kusunda will be dead in a few years, and if
> no DATA is available on it, then the works of Watters and Donohue will be
> the last things ever written about the language.
>
> Watters is unfortunately no longer with us, so his DATA is probably lost
> forever. As for Donohue, why he is so reluctant to publish his DATA is a
> mystery to me, despite having me asked him myself this question in Sydney
> this summer. Particularly when the public funds research, it is a mystery
> to me why researchers do not want the public to check the accuracy of their
> work and build upon it.
>
> In my original posting I did not make a mistake. Watters and Donohue hae
> not published their DATA and Uday and Tim have.
>
> thank you,
> Nathan
>
>
> --
> Dr Nathan W. Hill
> Reader in Tibetan and Historical Linguistics
> Research Coordinator, East Asian Languages and Cultures
> UK Director, London Confucius Institute
> SOAS, University of London
> Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK
> Tel: +44 (0)20 7898 4512
> Room 456
> --
> Profile -- http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff46254.php
> Tibetan Studies at SOAS -- http://www.soas.ac.uk/cia/tibetanstudies/
> --
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 3:32 PM Kristine Hildebrandt <khildeb at siue.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> H again all,
>>
>> I wanted to also just clarify that Mark Donohue's work on Kusunda is also
>> out there in many publications (co-authored with Bohj Raj Gautam and Madhav
>> Prasad Pokhrel), and so Uday Raj and Tim Bodt's publicly released data set
>> can be seen as complementing both David and Mark's published
>> descriptions/analyses:
>>
>> Donohue, Mark, and Bhoj Raj Gautam. 2013. Evidence and stance in Kusunda.
>> Nepalese Linguistics 28: 38-47.
>> http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/journals/nepling/
>> Donohue, Mark, Bhoj Raj Gautam and Madhav Prasad Pokharel. 2014.
>> Negation and nominalization in Kusunda. *Language* 90 (3): 737-745. DOI
>> 10.1353/lan.2014.0054 <https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2014.0054>
>> Gautam, Bhoj Raj, and Mark Donohue. 2014. Deixis in Kusunda. Nepalese
>> Linguistics 29: 152- 157.
>> http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/journals/nepling/
>> Donohue, Mark, and Bhoj Raj Gautam. 2016. Quantification in Kusunda. In
>> Denis Paperno and Ed. Keenan, eds., Quantification in Natural Language.
>> https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789400726802
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 6:56 AM Nathan Hill <nh36 at soas.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Colleague,
>>>
>>> I just wanted to let people know about the new data on Kusunda that Uday
>>> Raj and Tim Bodt have publicly filed on Zenodo. Kusunda is a language
>>> isolate with only two speakers. In the last decades some work was done on
>>> it by the late David E. Watters, and my Mark Donohue, but neither of them
>>> published their research data.
>>>
>>> Uday and Tim have now put more than 20 hours of material online open
>>> access, as described in the attached .pdf file.
>>>
>>> very best,
>>> Nathan
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Tibeto-burman-linguistics mailing list
>>> Tibeto-burman-linguistics at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>>
>>> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/tibeto-burman-linguistics
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Orche
>> ('Thanks' in Manange)
>>
>> *Kristine A. Hildebrandt*
>> *Professor, Department of English Language & Literature
>> <http://www.siue.edu/artsandsciences/english/>*
>> *President, Endangered Language Fund
>> <http://www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/>*
>>
>> *Secretary, Association for Linguistic Typology
>> <http://www.linguistic-typology.org/>*
>> *Editor, Himalayan Linguistics
>> <http://escholarship.org/uc/himalayanlinguistics>*
>>
>> *Southern Illinois University Edwardsville*
>>
>>
>> *Box 1431Edwardsville, IL 62026 U.S.A.618-650-3991 (department voicemail)*
>>
>>
>> *khildeb at siue.edu <khildeb at siue.edu>http://www.siue.edu/~khildeb
>> <http://www.siue.edu/~khildeb>*
>>
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-- 
Orche
('Thanks' in Manange)

*Kristine A. Hildebrandt*
*Professor, Department of English Language & Literature
<http://www.siue.edu/artsandsciences/english/>*
*President, Endangered Language Fund
<http://www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/>*

*Secretary, Association for Linguistic Typology
<http://www.linguistic-typology.org/>*
*Editor, Himalayan Linguistics
<http://escholarship.org/uc/himalayanlinguistics>*

*Southern Illinois University Edwardsville*

*Box 1431Edwardsville, IL 62026 U.S.A.618-650-3991 (department voicemail)*

*khildeb at siue.edu <khildeb at siue.edu>http://www.siue.edu/~khildeb
<http://www.siue.edu/~khildeb>*
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