Satellite Workshop for Sociolinguistic Archival Preparation
January 4-5, 2012
Portland, Oregon
The Satellite Workshop for Sociolinguistic Archival Preparation will be held in conjunction with the 86th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in Portland, Oregon in early January, 2012. The Workshop will begin at 10am on Wednesday, January 4 and continue through 3:30 PM on Thursday, January 5.
More information about the Workshop can be found below, including:
- Description
- Schedule [Download]
- Workshop registration
- Hotel room reservations
- Funding opportunities for student attendees
Description
The workshop's primary purpose is to propose techniques to permit the archiving of data, for cross-community sharing of corpora as well as for subsequent 'panel' studies. Recent discussions within the field have concluded that present protocols need to be expanded to permit adequate archiving. Specifically:
IRB paperwork needs to be adapted to provide protection for interviewees while permitting their speech data to be more generally sharable (and therefore archiveable);
Demographic, situational, and attitudinal protocols are needed to provide a unified resource serving multiple research communities as well as the contributing researchers.
The sooner IRB forms and research protocols are aligned with each other, the sooner sharable, archiveable corpora will become available, permitting intergroup comparison and interdisciplinary collaboration.
The University of Pennsylvania's Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), SIL, and European research groups have greater experience with archiving their data, and will share that experience to permit the attendees to develop state-of-the-art standards and practices for demographic, situational and attitudinal documentation, and for cogently presenting their need for such information to their local ethical review boards. Representatives of groups which have made specific demographic, situational or attitudinal innovations will also present evidence for the importance of their results for more generalized sharable protocol. At least half of each section will be devoted to questions and discussion among the presenters and the attendees.
The workshop will begin at 10:00 AM on Wednesday, January 4 and continue until 3:30 PM on Thursday, January 5, so please plan your travel and hotel accommodations accordingly.
Schedule: Day One
Download the complete schedule (PDF)
In the first section, Denise DePersio (LDC's human subjects protection specialist), Brian MacWhinney (whose CHILDES and TALKBANK websites provide guidance in these matters), and Natasha Warner (LSA Ethics Committee member) will share their experience, and answer questions.
In the second segment, representatives of large archived corpora, Cieri (LDC) and Simons (SIL) will discuss the importance of shared/overlapped demographic and situational protocols to allow corpora to be compared, and Brian MacWhinney, acting as discussant, will demonstrate the importance of sharing corpora more broadly.
In the third segment, three demographic clusters which are often coded too broadly or not at all will be discussed by those carrying out research in specific communities: The importance of not overgeneralizing 'Black' (Blake), 'Latino' (Fought/Otheguy) and 'Asian' (Wong/Hall-Lew) 'ethnicity' will be discussed; Poplack will be the discussant for this segment. The fourth segment will discuss different ways in which age and religious persuasion influence language variation (Bowie/Sykes). Eckert, Poplack, and Tagliamonte will act as discussants for this section, and will propose possible situation related foci which their work has shown should be more carefully coded in future studies.
Schedule: Day Two
The second day of the workshop will be devoted to variables which most sociolinguists have not attended to. Social psychologists have provided evidence that attitudes toward speakers from other social groups influence both how we perceive others and how we speak. Recent work has also highlighted the importance of speaker attitudes to linguistic presentation of self; presenters chosen have integrated attitudinal coding into their studies: Llamas, Wong/Hall-Lew, Nagy and Sykes will all provide evidence from their own studies, and will discuss how best to elicit and code for intergroup attitudes, and problems they've encountered along the way. Social psychologist Kim Noels will act as discussant, emphasizing those research variables which appear to be most likely to be usefully sharable, comparing the methods used in the studies discussed, and proposing ways for linguists to archive this information.
More general discussion among participants, the discussants, and the audience will follow, reviewing the general conclusions from both days' presentations, with the discussants presenting their conclusions.
Workshop Registration
Note that the conference registration fee covers attendance at the Satellite Workshop, at the LSA Meeting, or at both. To register for the workshop at discounted LSA member rates 1) go to http://www.lsadc.org/meetings/registration1.cfm?type=ssm; 2) select "Satellite Workshop for Sociolinguistic Archival Preparation" from the "Choose Sister Society" dropdown menu; 3) enter ARCHPREP2012 in the "Sister Society Passcode" field; 4) enter other requested information, including member type (student or regular) and press the "submit" button, and; 5) confirm that all the information you entered is correct, and press the "confirm" button. Follow the on-screen instructions to pay online or to generate a printable invoice you can send to the LSA with payment.
LSA members who have already registered for the LSA meeting but who would like to attend the workshop are asked to contact Malcah Yaeger-Dror (malcah@ldc.upenn.edu) or Chris Cieri (ccieri@ldc.upenn.edu) to confirm their intentions.
Hotel Room Reservations
The LSA has negotiated a room rate of $99/night single/double or $129/night triple/quad for rooms at the Portland Hilton & Executive Tower. To take advantage of this rate, reserve a room online or call 1-800-HILTONS and mention the Linguistic Society of America rate.
Funding Opportunities for Students
The National Science Foundation has allotted funding to cover two days of extra lodging at the conference hotel while the workshop is taking place. We predict that this will permit 10-15 graduate students to take part in the workshop who otherwise would not be able to. The funding application may be found at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GWHT3XW.
STUDENT registrants who take the survey at that address will have their information passed to LDC. Fill in the answers to the questions, and we will try to see how many graduate students can be covered. Preference will be given to students who are planning to carry out fieldwork, or who have already begun to do so. Those who will receive the funds should be hearing back from LDC within the next month, so apply now!
The workshop organizers are grateful to the National Science Foundation (BCS#1144480) and the Linguistic Data Consortium
