The World Loanword Database (WOLD, http://wold.livingsources.org/), edited by Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor and published by the Max Planck Digital Library (http://www.mpdl.mpg.de/) is a new digital resource for linguists that allows tracing the origin of loan words.

We had the oportunity to interview WOLD web developer Robert Forkel and ask him about the design philosophy and technology behind the platform. Soon (in about 1-2 weeks) we will also post an interview with Martin Haspelmath on the potential of WOLD for data-driven linguistic research.

Cornelius Puschmann: Robert, WOLD is a rich, open-access resource for studying a range of different questions in linguistics. Could you tell us a bit more about the history of WOLD itself, how it came into being?

Robert Forkel: Martin can tell you everything about the concept and history of WOLD, so I’ll focus on the development process. Successful collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA, http://www.eva.mpg.de/english/index.htm) on the World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS, http://wals.info/) led to the Cross-Linguistic Database Platform project (http://www.mpdl.mpg.de/projects/intern/cldp_de.htm). The idea behind the platform is the post-hoc integration of distributed resources via linked data (http://linkeddata.org/). WOLD is the second linked data resource for linguistics we have developed, so now the work on integration of the two can begin.

Cornelius Puschmann: Where does the data for WOLD come from and who contributed to it, apart from the editors and yourself?

Robert Forkel: I’ll also refer you to Martin for a detailed answer to that question. The short version is that the data was contributed by a large group of researchers over several years in the Loanword Typology Project and then adapted for Web publication.

Cornelius Puschmann: What kind of technology is WOLD based on and how can researchers interact with the data?

Robert Forkel: WOLD is implemented using a Python web application framework (currently Turbogears, but we’ll move to Pylons soon), serving data stored in a relational database (PostgreSQL). Good question regarding how researchers can interact with the data — we’d like to find out more about that once more people use WOLD. As stated above, we want to establish linked data and RDF as as data access and exchange protocols. This will be beneficial to our own integration plans, but ideally it would also replace CSV/Excel/etc as exchange formats. Our own plan in terms of data integration involves harvesting dispersed data and putting it in a central repository where it could be queried using SPARQL (http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/). Pretty much like OLAC (http://www.language-archives.org/), just for data.

Cornelius Puschmann: How long did it take to develop WOLD and what resources, in terms or specialists and work hours, are needed to put a project on this scale together?

Robert Forkel: There is no simple answer to this, since different steps were involved, with the development of the WOLD web platform just being the last one. The data for WOLD was collected in a project running over several years. During this project, the data was stored in a Filemaker database (http://www.filemaker.com/) which made for easy data input, but also required an extra data migration step for the online publication. Having gathered experience with this kind of toolset and the workflow of the linguists in the WALS Online project helped a lot.

The work on the online publication of the data was also an ongoing process over the course of more than a year. There are always delays in a project with many contributers and parties involved, where careful coordination between scholars and developers is pivotal. I think to put together a project of this scale requires an organization which can dedicate small amounts of resources over a longer period of time. The finished web application right now could probably be rewritten within a week or two — which I’m actually doing for the switch to a new software framework. But as with WALS, an iterative process was essential. There is simply no way of imagining (let alone specifying) such an application without looking at it and discussing it with practitioners.

Cornelius Puschmann: How does WOLD tie in with other MPDL/MPG-EVA projects and who do you see as target audiences for the different resources you provide?

Robert Forkel: In various ways. For resources like the intercontinental dictionary series (http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/ids/), and word lists in general, the ties are very strong, i.e. I think it should be possible to mix and match data from these resources without much programming. In fact, we think about reusing the web application serving WOLD to serve IDs as well, thereby publishing the ID data as linked data as well. With resources like WALS, integration will probably be on a more superficial level à la “and what does WALS say about language X?” Finding out what it may mean to query WALS and WOLD and ID data at once is ultimately the goal of the “cross-linguistic database platform” project, so stay tuned.
Regarding the target audience: the first week after its publication WOLD showed that, just as with WALS, the user community is not restricted to linguistic specialists, but quite diverse.

Cornelius Puschmann: How do legal and licensing issues come into play when developing such resources? What role does Open Access play?

Robert Forkel: Legal and data licensing issues should come into play at a very early stage of your project. There is significant demand for qualified real legal advice, since all of this is unchartered terrain. With WOLD we were in the fortunate situation that the data had not been published before and the editors agreed to publishing it under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license, which I’m told qualifies as “real” open access. Still, licensing and conveying license information is still a largely unsolved problem for research data, if not in principle, then practically in each concrete dataset I’ve encountered so far. A lot of insecurity in this area stems from a lack of precedent and explicit licensing terms.
Being able to publish WOLD and WALS open access is certainly essential for getting an entity like the MPDL involved, since we are committed to open access (http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html). Publishing restricted data would be hard to justify in our context.

Cornelius Puschmann: Where do you see the field moving in terms of digital resources and cyberinfrastructure in the future?

Robert Forkel: Well, fortunately for researchers, I don’t see the field moving forward so quickly that one risks falling behind. My personal opinion is that if maybe in three years a WOLD vocabulary can be imported in Excel or Google Spreadsheets by simply giving the vocabulary URL — and be meaningfully merged with a word list from IDs — I’d consider this a bright future.

Cornelius Puschmann: What are your recommendations for developers and researchers who want to build such resources or contribute to existing ones?

Robert Forkel: Get in touch! Actually the “contribution” question is still a big one for us. WALS has been a tremendous success in sliciting feedback.

I’d like to thank Robert for taking the time to chat with me.

January 18th
http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2010/01/top-11-things-i-learned-at-science.html
http://deepseanews.com/2010/01/miriam-joins-us-at-dsn/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jan/18/running-brain-memory-cell-growth
#scio10
#Biotechnology
#hcsm

January 19th
http://trueslant.com/ryansager/2010/01/18/science-reporting-gone-wild/
http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2010/01/science-on-the-bbc.html
http://friendfeed.com/brembs/177a01db/bertrand-russell-on-god-1959
#scio10
#Biotechnology
#ten23

January 20th
http://www.shortyawards.com/
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nada-importa
http://friendfeed.com/jcbradley/0a46ac22/science-online-2010-thoughts
#scio10
#health
#technology

January 21st
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-01/five-reasons-henrietta-lacks-most-important-woman-medical-history
http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2010/01/enough-w-good-here-are-top10-problems-w.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18423-viruses-use-hive-intelligence-to-focus-their-attack.html
#scio10
#technology
#ten23

January 22nd
http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs19/f/2007/248/a/f/dna_strand_corset_32_piercings_by_mizuzinkaholik.jpg
http://friendfeed.com/danielmietchen/cbfc448b/collaborative-futures-3-mike-linksvayer
http://scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2010/01/scientists_why_your_access_to.php
#scio10
#corporateeyesontheprize
#technology

January 23rd
http://www.badscience.net/2010/01/12-monkeys-no-8-wait-sorry-i-meant-14/
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/aw8
http://friendfeed.com/pansapiens/212fde9c/you-know-your-research-is-original-when
#scio10
#3wordsconservativeshate
#FF

January 24th
http://www.shortyawards.com/
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/printers-row/2010/01/eureka-great-discoveries-in-new-science-books.html
http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0/3124a7c3/looking-for-help-on-building-list-of-social-web
#3wordsconservativeshate
#retailpolitics
#scio10

January 25th
http://iambiotech.org/2010/01/25/biotech-roundup-monday-january-25th/?utm_source=hootsuite&utm_medium=tweet&utm_content=roundup&utm_campaign=hootsuite
http://friendfeed.com/mfenner/04c40a1a/scientists-and-librarians-friend-or-foe
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/markchangizi/100004573/do-ant-colonies-have-something-in-common-with-the-human-body/
#scio10
#hcsm
#science

In total, I’ve collected about 12.000 tweets since January 7th, containing 4.750 different URLs and 1.130 different hashtags.

10 most popular URLs

1. The Shorty Awards

2. Dennis Meadows: The Oil Drum: Economics and Limits to Growth: What’s Sustainable?

3. Björn Brembs: Social filtering of scientific information – a view beyond Twitter

4. BioData Product Blog: Laboratory Notebooks: A thing of the past?

5. Forbes.com: Illumina’s Cheap New Gene Machine

6. A photograph of clouds that seem to resemble Great Britain

7. Times Online: Baroness Greenfield loses her job in Royal Institution shake-up

8. Mr. Gunn: Cell launches a new format for the presentation of research articles online

9. Daniel Mietchen: On the need for a global academic internet platform [ref to Nadja Kutz: arxiv.org/abs/0803.1360]

10. Rebecca Skloot: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

These were tweeted between 5 (#9 and #10) and 30 (#1) times. However, tracking URLs is complicated by the fact that many different addresses may point to the same source, especially since people use a variety of different URL shorteners. This is something I’ll resolve later, so for now this fairly anecdotal.

15 most popular hashtags

1. #scio10 (391x)
2. #scidebate (84x)
3. #fb (75x)
4. #science (68x)
5. #technology (67x)
6. #tcot (58x)
7. #orca (54x)
8. #debateanatel (53x)
9. #Glee (31x)
10. #ff (27x)
11. #HeLa (26x)
12. #uksnow (26x)
13. #Haiti (25x)
14. #NetDE (24x)
15. #gov20 (21x)

Obviously some of these are automatically generated (#fb and #ff), but there’s a fair share of interesting ones. I’m expecting #scio10 will dominate the next few days even more visibly.

Hope it’s informative – let me know if you have any questions.

Here’s the text (snip):

Whereas modern computing technology has the potential of advancing linguistic science by enabling linguists to work with datasets at a scale previously unimaginable; and

Whereas this will only be possible if such data are made available and standards ensuring interoperability are followed; and

Whereas data collected, curated, and annotated by linguists forms the empirical base of our field; and

Whereas working with linguistic data requires computational tools supporting analysis and collaboration in the field, including standards, analysis tools, and portals that bring together linguistic data and tools to analyze them,

Therefore, be it resolved at the annual business meeting on 8 January 2010 that the Linguistic Society of America encourages members and other working linguists to:

make the full data sets behind publications available, subject to all relevant ethical and legal concerns;

annotate data and provide metadata according to current standards and best practices;

seek wherever possible institutional review board human subjects approval that allows full recordings and transcripts to be made available for other research;

contribute to the development of computational tools which support the analysis of linguistic data;

work towards assigning academic credit for the creation and maintenance of linguistic databases and computational tools; and

when serving as reviewers, expect full data sets to be published (again subject to legal and ethical considerations) and expect claims to be tested against relevant publicly available datasets.

I think it’s great that the LSA is throwing its weight behind this effort and supporting the idea of data sharing. The only minor complaint that I have concerns the wording – what exactly does make available mean? It could mean real Open Access, but also that you’ll email me your datasets if I ask nicely. Or it could mean that a publisher will make your datasets available for a fee – any of these approaches qualify as making data available in this terminology.

So, while I think this is good starting point, more discussion is needed. Especially when it comes to formats, means of access and licensing we need to be more explicit.

Imagine this scenario for a moment: you want to compare the semantic prosody of the verb cause across a dozen languages. If data sharing (and beyond that, resource sharing) were already a reality, we could do something like this:

1. Send a query to WordNetAPI* to identify the closest synonyms of cause in the target languages.
2. Send a query to UnversalCorpusAPI* using the terms we have just identified and specifying a list of megacorpora that we want to search in.
3. Retrieve the result in TEI-XML.
4. Analyze the results in R using the XML package.

The decisive advantage here would be that I only get the data I need, not everything else that’s in those megacorpora that is unrelated to my query. Things just need to be in XML and openly available and I can continue to process them in other ways. This would not just be sharing, but embedding your data in an infrastructure that makes it usable as part of a service. And that would be neat because what good is the data really if it doesn’t come with the tools needed to analyze it? And in 2010 tools=services, not locally installed software.

Now that would be awesome.

(*) fictional at this point, but technically quite feasible.

One component of this study will be a corpus of tweets by international scholars from different fields over the course of one year. This corpus will be assembled via the account @scientwists, an automated user controlled via the Twitter API, and made available in the public domain after completion. The @scientwists account will follow a list of scholars put together from several sources, starting with this list assembled by David Bradley.*

The corpus will be anonymized, i.e. user names will not be legible. It will also be possible to exclude individual posts from the corpus via use of the hashtag #exclude. However, if you receive a notification that @scientwists is following you and you would prefer for your tweets not to be included in the corpus at all, please simply block @scientwists.

If you have questions or suggestions, please be sure to contact me on Twitter or via email.

- Cornelius Puschmann, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (about me)

Note: if you are not an academic and are being followed by @scientwists2 you have been randomly included in the control group for this study. Please block @scientwists2 if you prefer your tweets not to be used.

The wording of the petition is cautious and deliberately vague, meaning it doesn’t suggest any precise steps to be taken. It cites the NIH mandate that makes it a requirement for all NIH-funded research to be retroactively published in PubMed as an example of how to make research results available to the general public.

Fisher provides background information on the petition and his motivation in this interview with Richard Poynder and has also answered a few questions for Heinz Pampel and me in wisspub.net (in German; also read Lars’ own blog post on the subject).

The striking thing about the petition is not that it gives precise policy recommendations (it doesn’t) or contains meticulous explanations of what Open Access is (it doesn’t), but that is has attracted popular support extending well beyond the “usual suspects” from the OA scene.

How did that happen?

While I can’t provide absolute proof, I think the short answer is the Social Web. Fisher’s petition was scooped up by people who ordinarily have little to do with the Open Access community, which consists mostly of librarians and academics, but who are very much invested into the idea of Openness in other contexts: open (government) data, no censorship of the Internet, digital privacy rights etc. There is a budding political movement in Germany and elsewhere and the petition was interpreted as congruent with the goals of this movement and therefore spread with according speed. It was featured on Netzpolitik.org, which is frequently ranked as Germany’s most popular blog, and one prolific supporter is social media personality Sascha Lobo, who placed a banner on his website calling for support of the petition. Meanwhile, several German organizations lobbying for Open Access have posted press releases on their sites or offer flyers in support of the petition for downloading and printing. To the crowd that has been made aware of Open Access via the abovementioned blogs, a printed flyer may seem idiosyncratic to say the least. These are not public servants who support Open Access primarily because it’s their job, these are people who believe publicly funded research should be available to everyone on the Internet.

Lars makes this point in the interview with Richard Poynder:

As far as I see it, Open Access has always been treated — even by its supporters — as a niche topic for experts. But that is wrong. It is an issue that in the long run concerns everyone, and many people understand that.

My opinion (and not just mine) is that Open Access should be treated as the broad societal issue it really is, not just as a nifty way for libraries to save money or researchers to communicate more effectively. Not that there is anything wrong with those two points, but we are utterly out of touch with reality if we believe that that is something the public cares about very much, or needs to care about.

Cameron Neylon nails it in my opinion in this excellent post on Open Research:

A good question to ask at this point is “Why?” Why do I do these things? Why does the government fund me to do them? Actually it’s not so much why the government funds them as why the public does. Why does the taxpayer support our work? Even that’s not really the right question because there is no public. We are the public. We are the taxpayer. So why do we as a community support science and research? Historically science was carried out by people sufficiently wealthy to fund it themselves, or in a small number of cases by people who could find wealth patrons. After the second world war there was a political and social concensus that science needed to be supported and that concensus has supported research funding more or less to the present day. But with the war receding in public memory we seem to have retained the need to frame the argument for research funding in terms of conflict or threat. The War on Cancer, the threat of climate change. Worse, we seem to have come to believe our own propaganda, that the only way to justify public research funding is that it will cure this, or save us from that. And the reality is that in most cases we will probably not deliver on this.

I think it is extremely brave and laudable of Cameron to bring up this question – the touchiest of all, in a sense, because it’s the one you’re trained to never really ask as an academic. What is it all good for? Does my research really benefit the public, or is that just a mantra that we keep repeating to ourselves out of habit? He puts the question of academia’s usefulness into a historical perspective to make the point that there is no natural law saying that we must have publicly funded research simply because researchers like doing what they do. There are sound reasons why we have it, of course. But Cameron makes a very strong case for Open Science as being the basis of any kind of research in the long-term future, because a lack of openness means a lack of accountability, and without accountability society might simple decide at some point that it doesn’t really need to pump money into the production of knowledge it is then prevented for accessing.

The Web has made it incredibly easy to find information for anyone who can formulate a search query. We cannot anticipate who the person searching for information may be, what their background knowledge is and whether they can tell a reliable source from an unreliable one. We are allowed to hope for these things, sure, but it’s not our job to make the judgment about who gets to read what we publish and who doesn’t. It’s our job to put it out there and let the Web do the rest.

Do we need better science communication? Yes, certainly.

Does Open Access need to be financially viable? Of course.

But all common arguments against Open Access – “the general public has no interest in/doesn’t understand scientific publications anyway”, “we can’t do anything that would endanger traditional publishing models because we cannot do science without publishers”, “there is no quality control in with OA” – are either shortsighted, arrogant, factually wrong or outright silly, yet OA advocates address them relentlessly with the goal of winning over a generation that, from a pessimistic point of view, will never regard Openness as an equally essential basic principle as the one that is retweeting calls to sign the petition and writing blog posts about it.

If you get the Internet, Open Access is a no-brainer – in a sense the success of the petition has already proven that point. Social media appeals to people who use the Net as their primary source of information and who accordingly believe that information should be free. In other words, they believe in Open Access, even without knowing Peter Suber or having read the Berlin Declaration.

Maybe we should start talking to these people.

Panel session at the 5th International Symposium on Politeness, 30 June – 2 July 2010, Basel, Switzerland

Theresa Heyd (University of Pennsylvania), Cornelius Puschmann (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

In its earliest days, politeness theory set out to identify “universals in language use” (Brown and Levinson 1978). Such claims to universality were later contested, in particular with regard to cultural variation (e.g. Wierzbicka 1991): norms of appropriateness, concepts of face and other sociopragmatic aspects are nowadays accepted to be (somewhat) culture-specific. In the light of such ‘variationist’ tendencies, it may be asked whether politeness and self-presentation are also medium- and technology-specific. Are there new politeness paradigms in online communication, especially in its most recent forms?

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr are “technologies of the self” (Foucault) where people do things with words in a very literal sense. Constructing a digital self via video, images and still most prominently language (“meforming”; Naaman et al. 2009) and negotiating it in exchanges with other users are central activities in social media formats. While facework could previously be classified unambiguously in terms of linguistic and non-linguistic actions, the digitally constructed self also “acts” via language when symbolically engaging in interpersonal activities such as liking, poking, friending, following, banning and muting. These linguistic quasi-actions replace the means which are available offline to indicate stance and manage impressions and therefore fulfill an important function. In a larger sense, it appears that the concept of “face” itself has taken on a new meaning in digital social media that is simultaneously more encompassing and more important: establishing and negotiating an online identity has become one of the central activities of Internet users.

We particularly invite contributions on the following issues:
* Constructing and maintaining face in social media
* Performative and metacommunicative acts in social media
* Consequences and implications of online self exposure: identity management, identity safety, privacy vs. exposure
* Performing face in social media vs. Web 1.0 and pre-digital settings
* The mitigation of face in online/offline interactions.

This panel focuses on the related aspects of self-presentation and symbolic actions as components of digital face management. We welcome contributions addressing all forms of online communication; studies regarding more recent social media are especially welcome. Both theory-building and data-driven contributions are of interest.

Abstracts (500 words max.) should be submitted by December 1, 2009. Please feel free to contact the panel organizers for more information:
heyd@ldc.upenn.edu
cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de

References

Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1978. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: CUP.

Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the self.” In Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick Hutton (eds) Technologies of the Self. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 16–49.

Naaman, Mor, Jeffrey Boase and Chi-Hui Lai. 2009. “Is it really about me? Message content in social awareness streams.” CSCW 2010, February 6–10, 2010, Savannah, Georgia, USA. Available at http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~mor/publications/NaamanCSCW2010.pdf

Wierzbicka, Anna. 1991. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin: de Gruyter.

I was grateful for the opportunity to present on this subject for several reasons. Firstly, I believe that a topic such as Open Access is best approached holistically, i.e. by taking on the researcher’s perspective. It makes much more sense in my opinion to embed a discussion of Open Access into the larger picture of communicating research results openly on the Web, instead of treating it as an isolated issue that is primarily about making publishing cheaper.

Another reason is that graduate education tends to neglect what are perceived as ‘peripheral’ issues, such as where/how to publish, the inner workings of the academic job market and why visibility (not just inside your own discipline) is important. We need to promote digital literacy among grad students, in the sense of teaching

• new methods, tools and infrastructure for doing research (e-science, e-social-science, e-humanities),
• new ways of presenting and making accessible one’s research (Open Access, self-archiving),
• new ways of communicating with colleagues and working collaboratively (tagging/bibliography-sharing, collaborative writing) and
• new approaches to teaching and learning (using video lectures, creating digital learning materials).

My impression is that the best way to achieve something like digital scholarly literacy is to take an integrative approach to these issues. E-science, virtual research environments, e-learning and social media tools for collaboration are hardly ever discussed in concert, but often treated as separate topics. While this may appear to be a more focused way of looking at things (especially if you’re a librarian, funding agency etc), all of these themes are connected in the daily lives of scholars. Cameron Neylon’s points on innovation in science blogging (“The natural unit of science research is the blog post”) go hand in hand in my view with Michael Habib’s observations on digital scholarly identity and a discussion of e-learning and e-teaching could easily be attached to this.

All of these things are part of digital scholarship as an integrated process – as opposed to analog scholarship with a few digital bits here and there.

Thanks to everyone who attended for their questions and comments!