At the Cyberling workshop in 2009, Working Group 6 (participants Mark Liberman, David Lightfoot, Anthony Aristar, Collin Baker, Helen Dry and Laura Welcher) was tasked with exploring how to support the creation and maintenance of this ongoing cyberinfrastructure for linguistic data. They conceptualized this in terms of a four dimensional matrix: (1) projects and activities that need support, (2) potential sources of support, (3) organizational structures through which support can flow and (4) general concepts and principles.

Under (2), the WG6 white paper notes the following sources of support:

From the call for papers:

Date: 25.11.2011, half-day (afternoon) + banquet
LTC Workshop paper submission deadline : 05-sep-2011

Theme: Covering the existing gaps in Language Resources (LR) and Technologies (LT) is a challenging task not only for the so-called "Less-Resourced Languages" (LRL) but also for the technologically more advanced ones. Therefore we believe that this workshop will be of general interest for all. Still, the needs of the less-resourced languages are worth being specifically considered in order to reduce the unbalanced situation among languages.

Topics:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the National Robotics Initiative (http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?org=ENG&ods_key=nsf11553) on 24 June; the solicitation is unusual in that it involves collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The most recent NSF Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) solicitation http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?WT.z_pims_id=12810&ods_key=... was posted on 1 April 2001. The next deadline for proposals is Tuesday, 25 October 2011. CRI supports two types of projects:

• Institutional Infrastructure, for either
  1. the creation of new computing research infrastructure (II-NEW), or
  2. the enhancement of existing such infrastructure (II-EN).

In a previous post (http://blog.cyberling.org/node/702), I briefly described the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI)'s Software Infrastructure for Scientific Innovation (SI2) solicitation, with a proposal deadline of 18 July 2011. OCI recently issued a "Dear Colleague Letter" calling attention to its goals for this solicitation, and Emily Bender suggested I follow up with a Cyberling posting about it. Since the DCL is not very long, I thought it best simply to quote it in full:

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has just announced a new Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) solicitation at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11554/nsf11554.pdf, with a deadline of 20 Sept 2011 for proposals (note: not 15 Sept as in past years). Projects must focus on one or more of the following areas:

Linked Data in Linguistics
Linguists from all disciplines produce more and more data and share the challenge how to make this data accessible to other researchers in their field and beyond. This does not only concern the general availability of data, but also the representation of the structure of the data. Linked Data is one paradigm which can be employed to tackle this task.
We are happy to announce the workshop "Linked Data in Linguistics" at the annual meeting of the German Linguistic Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS) taking place March 7-9, 2012 in Frankfurt a.M., Germany.

Claire Bowern has started a discussion on her blog, Anggarrgoon, about access to aggregated lexical data: how to protect the rights of the various stake holders while encouraging as much sharing as possible. I enjoyed her tongue-in-cheek suggestion that linguist-contributors should, in game-theoretic fashion, get access to data in proportion to the data they share.

This might be of interest to folks: The call for the 2011 CI computing fellowships is out: http://cifellows.org/. These fellowships provide very generous funding:

The CIFellow’s salary for one year, at $75,000.
Health and other fringe benefits for the CIFellow. We expect the host institution to offer the CIFellow the standard package that it normally offers.
Discretionary expenses for the CIFellow, including moving costs as well as other minor costs (such as travel to conferences, etc.).
Indirect costs for the host institution (up to 25%).

Kimberly (“Kim”) Christer (Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies, Washington State University), an anthropologist by training, presented “Open and shut: Digital repatriation and the circulation of indigenous knowledge” on 4-14-11 at the University of Washington, Seattle campus. With the support of NEH, she is working on the development of the “Mukurtu software tool” (http://www.mukurtuarchive.org/documentation.html), a user-customizable tool for the creation of archives.