Resolution on Cyberinfrastructure
The following was passed by LSA members present at the Annual Business Meeting of the LSA in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 8, 2010 as a "sense of majority of the meeting" resolution. It was submitted to the membership at large in May 2011 for a "sense of the majority of the membership" and passed by a majority of the members responding.
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,
Therefore, the LSA 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;
- work towards assigning academic credit for the creation and maintenance of linguistic data bases; 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
In addition, the LSA recognizes the importance of creating further computational tools for supporting analysis and collaboration in the field, including:
- standards
- analysis tools
- portals that bring together linguistic data and tools to analyze them.
Adopted January 8, 2010.