[open-linguistics] Is this group doing anything for Open Data day?

Mon Jan 20 19:46:00 UTC 2014

Dear Saul,

as far as I know, there are no plans for the Open Data Day from our side  
at the moment. We do plan, however, another Linked Data in Linguistics  
workshop in May. But if you want to push it, your initiative is highly  
appreciated and should be discussed over the list or at the next telco.

Thematically, a discussion of the legal situation of small (or large)  
datasets of recordings would be highly relevant to the group and is  
definitely something we always had on the agenda. Unfortunately, it didn't  
go much beyond the intention, so far, as there were other projects lurking  
which were also in the scope of the group and which attracted a great deal  
of attention (such as the Linked Open Data stuff). But in any case,  
everyone on the list would welcome discussions about the legal situation.

The type of data you describe would be very similar to datasets from  
typology and language documentation, and a workshop on such kind of data  
could continue, e.g., earlier activities such as the Linked Data in  
Typology track of the ALT conference organized by Sebastian Nordhoff this  
summer. If you want to organize something in this direction under the  
umbrella of the OWLG, we can add this as a topic for discussion to the  
agenda for the next telco, and you may get in direct touch with the  
typology (etc.) folks on the list.

I would personally discourage starting an new OKFN working group as long  
as your area of expertise and your interests overlaps with the scope of an  
existing one -- unless you already have strong community ties you can  
build on. Founding is easy, but not all groups I joined are equally  
active, and those that are seem to live from the energy of very few  
dedicated people, so you would have to prepare for a huge investment of  
time and energy if you want to really keep it alive ;)

Best,
Christian

On Mon, 20 Jan 2014 18:35:13 +0100, Saul Albert  
<saul.albert at eecs.qmul.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hello Open Linguists,
>
> I'm wondering if you lot are doing anything for Open Data Day.
>
> I was thinking of organising a workshop on open licenses and rights
> issues for small data sets: the kinds of video/audio recordings and
> transcriptions of interaction that linguistic anthropologists /
> ethnographers and other qualitative analysts might collect and use.
>
> I'm not sure whether this kind of initiative belongs in Open Linguistics
> which seems more big-data/nlp oriented.
>
> I'm also not sure this initiative would amount to anything. Since
> learning to work with this kind of data - doing conversation analysis -
> I've been horrified by the rights issues, attitudes and lack of
> awareness in the field. In fact, I think the retrograde attitudes
> towards data ownership and sharing prevent funders taking systematic
> qualitative research more seriously.
>
> So - should I put up my hand and wave about this in the Open Linguistics
> project context - or should I talk to OKF about a new Open Ethnography
> (or something) initiative?
>
> Your thoughts appreciated,
>
> All the best,
>
> Saul.

-- 
Christian Chiarcos
Applied Computational Linguistics
Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt a. M.
60054 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

office: Robert-Mayer-Str. 10, #401b
mail: chiarcos at informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
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