I'm aware of some projects in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics that share their data either in an open access format, without any substantial restrictions or delays, or without any "application" process as long as the work is for non-profit purposes. The idea is that everything that goes beyond a simple "Safeguard" letter hinders the maximal exploitation of limited and valuable resources.
These best practice examples, which make (often publicly-funded) data collections available to the public deserve recognition. While I can think of many historical data collection, the Helsinki Corpora Family or the BYU corpora, the more contemporary the data get, the fewer resources are publicly accessible. On the more contemporary end, I can think of, as exceptions,
* the Linguistic Atlas Project (http://www.lap.uga.edu)
and our own
* J. K. Chambers Dialect Topography database (http://dialect.topography.chass.utoronto.ca)
* Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (www.dchp.ca/dchp2).
Which other projects of active data sharing do you know?
I'd appreciate your input for a list of Best Practice Data Collections that I'm preparing.
Best wishes,
Stefan D.
Hi Stefan, Not exactly what you are after I suspect, but I like the Mind Research Repository's idea of publishing "paper packages". You publish your (linguistics) paper along with the full data set, any scripts you used to process the data, and so forth, ensuring reproducibility. Check out the site: http://openscience.uni-leipzig.de/index.php/mr2/index .
Thanks, Jacob! That's exactly what I'm after (or after, as well). Tusen tack!
You are welcome to access my Quaker Historical Corpus (untagged), either here:
https://www.woodbrooke.org.uk/resource-category/quaker-historical-corpus/
or here:
http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/QHC/
It's rather specialised! 1655-1699.
I just thought of another best practice example. The Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) offers a model for how transcribed interview data (plus audio files) can be shared: https://www.univie.ac.at/voice/
The login is retrieved after a simple agreement form, no other restrictions.
Are you familiar with The Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORALL):
http://lingtools.uoregon.edu/coraal/
Or the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech
https://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/team/
I also think the intension is for the The Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English to fit your criteria as well, although it is not yet available:
https://csivc.csi.cuny.edu/aapcappe/
The public interface for DECTE corpus (Talk of the Toon) is probably not exactly what you are looking for, but I thought I would mention it as well.
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/toon/
And the UK Data Archive probably doesn't fit your criteria either, although some corpora there are easily available once you register at the site.
Thanks, Joseph, your information is very helpful (and encouraging)!
My tagged Letters as Loot Corpus of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch personal letters is, provided with elaborate search facilities, freely accessible at http://brievenalsbuit.inl.nl. Reference: The Letters as Loot/ Brieven als Buit corpus. Leiden University. Compiled by Marijke van der Wal (Programme leader), Gijsbert Rutten, Judith Nobels and Tanja Simons, with the assistance of volunteers of the Leiden-based Wikiscripta Neerlandica transcription project, and lemmatised, tagged and provided with search facilities by the Institute for Dutch Lexicology (INL). 2013; second release 2015.
See also the OA monograph Gijsbert Rutten & Marijke van der Wal. 2014. Letters as Loot: A sociolinguistic approach to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. OA: http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027269577
Thanks, Marijke, for adding your and your associates' free resources!
There is an interesting discussion on journal publishing that I think is liked with open access corpora issue. This issue concerns the idea that journals do not just get the finished paper, or even the paper with the data, but that publishing works in a two-stage process: first, you submit your study plan and lit review, this will be vetted and approved/rejected. If approved, you get a publishing guarantee under certain conditions (such as that you carry out the study as promised) and then, REGRADLESS OF THE RESULT, the study will be published. This sounds like A GREAT IDEA to me. It reduces, as the colleagues in psych say where the proposal is discussed, the publication bias in that only positive results are reported, not the negative ones. I think in linguistics we'd do good to look into this proposal. Any thoughts? Here is my source: https://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-3168.html
Miriam Meyerhoff, James Walker and Erik Schleef might be interested in this issue, no? Would it be doable, viable in the field?
MICASE (the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) has been open access since completion. No registration required!
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/c/corpus/corpus?c=micase;page=simple
Thanks, Dushyanthi. I remember the corpus - thanks for pointing it out!
The French CNRS ( National Center for Scientific Research) provides a large open access database of historical and contemporary dictionaries on the CNRTL portal ( see http://www.cnrtl.fr/dictionnaires/anciens/). Many scholars contributed that enterprise and we thought it was normal to give free access to such an important linguistic resource as it was made with public money.
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