[open-linguistics] LINGUIST List birthday and new service GeoLing

[Damir Cavar]

Hi everybody,

please allow me to announce that The LINGUIST List is celebrating its
25th birthday. It started in the days when only a few knew about email,
when websites did not exist, and access to internet services was a
privilege for a few (often using acoustic couplers over classical phone
lines, where 300 Baud was a luxury speed). It has evolved, as many of
the professional internet services for linguistics, corpora, speech and
language technologies.

Here is a brief summary of some of the history of LINGUIST:

http://blog.linguistlist.org/ll-main/happy-birthday-to-the-linguist-list/

Here is the first posting submitted to a small group of subscribers Dec.
13th 1990:

http://linguistlist.org/issues/1/1-0.html

Please consider supporting the LINGUIST List services:

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/


Speaking about services for linguistics and all its sub-disciplines:


We are launching a new service called GeoLing. You can test a first
pilot here:

http://geoling.linguistlist.org/

GeoLing will show all linguistics related conferences, summer schools,
jobs, language information, institutions, and other events in a map that
is also aware of the users geo-location. It should run just fine in
common mobile devices. Information that contains geo-coordinates or
addresses and that is posted on LINGUIST List (using the structured
submission interface on its website:
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm) will be mapped in this
interface.

Again, the emphasis for GeoLing is on linguistics, which includes
theoretical, descriptive, documentary, cognitive, psycho-linguistics,
etc., and in particular corpus and computational linguistics.

The pop-ups for events and institutions will be click-able in mobile
devices and allow you to add the event dates and address to your device
or personal information manager.

This interface will allow also to advertise local talks that are not
posted on LINGUIST due to policies on relevance for example.

We are preparing the first Release Candidate and ask you for
contribution and assistance. If you test the interface, check for
example "Languages" or "Contacts" and navigate somewhere to Bloomington
Indiana in the US, to see some sample entries. :-)

How can you contribute and make this useful?

If you would like your "linguistic" institution (academic, research,
education, or even business) to be listed in GeoLing, simply submit a
vCard attachment to: calcard at linguistlist.org and it will be
integrated in the system, after verification.

If you would like your personal office address to be displayed in
GeoLing, do the same, send an email to the above address and attach a
vCard with your office address to it. Please add a sentence that says
"Please add my office address to GeoLing".

If you would like to advertise your local talks and events, we can read
the necessary information from a iCal URL that you send us. If you have
set up your own accessible iCal with read permissions where you post
events, send the access credentials and the URL to the email above, and
we will attach it to the system. Your talks and local events will show
up on GeoLing, if approved and accessible. If you do not keep track of
full location information (address) in the "location" field of the iCal
entries, but always have the events at the same address and maybe in
different rooms, please send us a vCard with the institution address as
well, so that we can associate every event with the appropriate address.

If you do not have not set up a shared iCal service, we can set you up
an account for an iCal URL on our system, and even a vCard server.

In future versions we will hopefully be able to offer tag-controlled
subscription to iCals from any of your devices, so that one would for
example have access to a calendar on a mobile phone with only events
related to "syntax" or "French".

Institutions that post and publish their own information and
announcements can contact us to talk about a more systematic connection
and information exchange with our services.

If you have suggestions and ideas related to LINGUIST and these
services, please let us know!


Thank you all!

Best wishes and happy holidays and a happy New Year!


Damir


-- 
Damir Cavar
Dept. of Linguistics
Indiana University
The LINGUIST List
http://linguistlist.org/
http://cavar.me/damir/