January 2025: Digital Infrastructure Manuscript
Last calendar year, I revised a manuscript with Sophie Pierson (UT Austin, now at IXL Learning), Sunny Ananthanarayan (Washington), and Claire Bowern (Yale) on consequences of the broken digital infrastructure for language documentation.
This manuscript has been accepted with major revisions at Language, Language Documentation & Revitalization section.
The abstract reads:
Linguists need to collect, organize, analyze, and share data. Despite the variability of linguistic research in terms of inputs and outcomes, there are some common stages, including morphological parsing, lexicon creation, and textual editing. A common software tool for this work is FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx). In this article, we examine some of the ways that FLEx’s data structures conflict with contemporary practices in language work. These assumptions exclude key groups of users and erect barriers to theoretically and practically relevant research. Where workarounds are feasible, they are both fragile and costly. We use this example to start a broader conversation about software infrastructure for digital linguistic data analysis, and how problems with this infrastructure reflect larger issues in the discipline.
