13 years ago
Tim Berners-Lee, the web and open data
Last week I went to see a public lecture by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the protocols for the World Wide Web - the shiny link-clicking front end of the internet we all take for granted. Not only did he create the web, but he is now one of the biggest advocates of open and accessible data.
It was a talk that touched on a lot of the problems facing modern digital societies; the problem with giving all your data to a single, non-sharing company (like Facebook) and the problem with governments trying to bully people into keeping data locked down (like the tragedy of Arron Swartz). Because it was as the University of Melbourne he also talked a bit about the need to keep data accessible as part of research. This is something we talk about a lot in the field of language documentation, but not so much in other areas of linguistics - so today I thought that I would share way I work to illustrate the kinds of ideas that Berners-Lee was trying to get across.
When I wrote the Lamjung Yolmo dictionary I didn’t just type all the words up in alphabetical order in a text document. I used a program called Toolbox, which allowed me to create a database of the language that can be used for other processes too. The program stores the underlying data in a .txt file (the more modern Fieldworks stores the same data as an xml file). This means that in the future, even if people don’t have Toolbox, they can still find the data useful for other projects because the data isn’t ‘locked’ into the program, and the underlying file is a common type with consistent formatting. Many projects involve specific programs that mean the data can never come out of them, and when people stop developing it your data can be 'trapped’ in an out-dated program.
My data will still be accessible after Toolbox and I are gone, because the programs I use create open type files, and because I archive it all with Paradisec (but that’s a story for another day). But even all of this doesn’t mean my research is always accessible.
For my PhD I was awarded an APA stipend. This was around just over $70,000 (Australian) over three and a half years. That money came from the Australian tax paying public (for which I am always grateful, just don’t ever figure out what that works out to an hour, it’s a little grim). So, I was payed money that came from the public to do this research, but what happens when I want to publish and share my findings? It’s likely that I will write journal articles and, if someone is interested/stupid enough to green-light it, perhaps a book. Almost all of this kind of output is part of a business model that does not accept openness of information. Even if you are a member of the Australian public I cannot just give you copies of my work because now a publishing company has the rights to it, I can’t even give other colleagues copies according to the terms and conditions of contracts with such publishers. Things are changing slowly - for example the excellent journal Language Documentation and Conservation (in which I have this joint paper about tools for language elicitation), bypasses the traditional publishing model, meaning that I can distribute the paper to as many people as I like under a Creative Commons license and not be charged for sharing my own work. It doesn’t sound like a big step, but these kind of processes mean that we’re becoming more aware about the way in which we share our work.
My thoughts after the #TBLDownunder talk by @timberners_lee last week: www.superlinguo.com/post/42941238715/tim-ber... (L) #OpenData #Academia
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