Introducing the Cyberling blog
The goal of this blog is to provide a point of virtual collaboration regarding the creation, promotion and maintenance of cyberinfrastructure for the field of linguistics (and language sciences more broadly).
At the Cyberling 2009 workshop in Berkeley, CA (July 2009), "communication" was identified as a key issue in the development of cyberinfrastructure. In particular, we need to communicate about standards (availability and development), tool and resource availability, needs assessment, and principles & practices. People working on tools and standards across linguistics and the language sciences more broadly need to be aware of each other and each other's efforts and need to be able to communicate with potential users for needs assessment. (Mark Liberman commented that every successful piece of software starts with someone scratching an itch: they have a problem, build a solution, and share that solution. But not everyone who has a problem that can be solved with software has the means/skills to build that software themselves.) People potentially using tools and standards need to be able to find them. People who should be using tools and standards but don't yet know about them, need to be reached.
It is our hope that this blog will become a useful vehicle for communication across all these dimensions, as well as a useful repository for information about cyberinfrastructure for linguistics. We envision contributions to be one of these six basic types:
- conference/workshop announcements (and reports)
- project announcements
- funding opportunities
- issues/op-eds
- tutorials
- software/hardware/book/paper reviews.
Rather than attempting to organize the information in an encyclopedic fashion, we are experimenting with a set of tags which can be assigned to posts to build an index to the posts for later reference.
We hope that the comments on the blog posts will be both collegial and lively, and also that visitors will use the associated forum for more general discussion. Welcome!
