A lot of digital ink has been spilled in recent years laying out standards and best practices for language documentation and archiving, and rightly so. Coherent standards greatly improve the usefulness and longevity of archived data, and getting standards right is a difficult process. And, measures like the recent LSA resolution and the requirements of funding agencies are an important step towards getting researchers to use these standards.

About a year ago, in working on this paper, I attempted to do rough count of the affiliations of people submitting code change requests for the ISO 639-3 language codes.

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.

On January 26, the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) announced its latest Strategic Technologies for Cyberinfrastructure (STCI) program solicitation, with target dates for full proposal submission of April 21 and August 5, 2010. The goal of the STCI program "is to support activities that lead to innovative cyberinfrastructure but are not currently funded by other programs or solicitations".

As described in a recently posted Dear Colleague letter, NSF has set up six task forces including NSF Program Officers and "distinguished members from the external science and engineering community" to "develop a long term vision" for a Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CF21).

On Jan 8, Fritz Newmeyer gave a very interesting talk at the University of Washington about the lack of evidence for a particular parameter from Principles and Parameters theory.

At the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in Baltimore there was a presentation by Rebecca Guenther of the Library of Congress (who is also Rotating chair of the ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee) about ISO language code standards.

At the recently concluded Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in Baltimore, the following resolution on Data Sharing was passed by those at the Business Meeting. It will soon be sent along to the whole membership of the Society for their vote. The resolution was put forth by the LSA's Technology Advisory Committee.

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At the Max Planck Society in Germany we currently are building up the Language Description Heritage (LDH), a digital library to share extant linguistic description and analysis. We plan to officially announce this initiative around February 2010. Currently, we are busy finishing the practical workflow and the communication with the authors who want to submit their work to this digital library.

On Thursday, November 19, the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) announced a new Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure (SDCI) solicitation, with a full proposal deadline of February 28, 2010. It expects to make 25 to 30 awards totaling $15,000,000 over three years. The program synopsis reads as follows.