{"id":3446,"date":"2006-09-12T12:18:42","date_gmt":"2006-09-12T12:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/09\/permanence-and-accountability\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:44:25","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:44:25","slug":"permanence-and-accountability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/09\/permanence-and-accountability\/","title":{"rendered":"Permanence and Accountability"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jane’s last post<\/a> and a post<\/a> on the ever excellent Language Log<\/a> have got me thinking about permanence and accountability in the internet age. Its a theme that I encounter again and again, working for a digital archive.<\/p>\n


\nFirst, Mark Liberman’s post<\/a> on Language Log was a fairly scathing breakdown, reference by reference, article by article, that showed that a point supposedly backed up by hard evidence, well, wasn’t. A great effort really. And thanks to his extensive linking, and by simply placing the relevant articles online, we too can come to much the same conclusion. Well, admittedly, I just took his word for it… but that’s all I’ve got time for over my morning coffee.
\nExciting things are happening in academia with individuals and organisations starting to fully utilise the internet. As Jane mentions<\/a>, Sydney University is having great success with several new digital initiatives. I think DSpace is the bee’s knees! Its going to be wonderful. Its one step closer to directly linking to the actual section of the actual article which you’re interested in. That’s the kind of functionality that I’m after.
\nGreat, you say, that’ll save me 10 minutes of searching in the library. Well, yes, says I, but that’s not what’s interesting. Imagine linking directly and explicitly to the paragraphs or sentences that you are interested in. That’s heaps better than a simple article reference. Suddenly the reader can discover exactly<\/i> what your talking about, quickly, and by jumping directly from one article to the next, in a way that you’re already accustomed to.
\nBut really that’s just the beginning. Think of the Altavista to Google leap. (This over simplifies it a bit but,) Altavista was a simple but vast index of content words and meta tags. Google came along with, amongst other things, the idea that links actually expressed something meaningful, and suddenly the internet became a whole lot more useful.
\nWell, imagine reading an interesting article and being able to see who quoted it. Imagine a density plot of the most popular quotes overlaid on the text of the article. What parts of a paper are people talking about the most? You could establish quotable articles and the articles that quoted the quotables and became quotable themselves. Imagine looking at quotability on a time line. You would be able to see the “hot spots” in the development of ideas over time. These would be simple additions to a modern search engine, and in fact have already be added in a rough sense. All that needs to happen (maybe that should be scare quoted) is for researchers to adopt a new referencing scheme and to archive their articles in digital repositories.
\nLeap sideways, imagine that instead of articles, we put up our raw research and\/or field work data. Not only can you link directly to the source(s) for your argument, so can others in their critique. Let them crunch the numbers if they don’t believe you. Or say you’re talking about discourse pragmatics, then people may like to hear for themselves the utterance’s intonation. Even better, say you were unable to explore an interesting avenue, this leaves it open for someone else to come along and explore. This is a critical ability to facilitate when you’re talking about endangered languages.
\nTo me this extensive referencing is a straight forward way of increasing the empirical weight that a piece of research holds. Sure, where people have already referenced articles, it already technically there, but I’m talking about granularity of referencing here. And in terms of source data, I’m talking about qualifying your statements as explicitly as possible.
\nBut, to come crashing down to reality again, this technology is not quite there yet. Well actually it kinda is there, the main problem as I see it is adoption. So first of all get uploading!<\/a>. A good solid base of data is where this revolution will begin!
\nThese are hot topics in the Documentary Linguistics and Digital Repositories fields. There’ll be a fair bit of discussion of this at our upcoming conference<\/a>, which is look’s like its going to have a great line up of interesting papers. If this kind of thing interests you, then we hope to see you there!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jane’s last post and a post on the ever excellent Language Log have got me thinking about permanence and accountability in the internet age. Its a theme that I encounter again and again, working for a digital archive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,13,4,5,6,7,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archiving","category-experience","category-fieldwork","category-linguistics","category-paradisec","category-rnld","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3446"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4135,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3446\/revisions\/4135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}