Open Research across Disciplines

How the principles of open research can be applied to your discipline

Modern Language, Literature and Linguistics

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Case Studies

UKRN case study: Literature – contemporary American and British fiction, and various academic and fiction publishing cultures

UKRN case study: Linguistics- evolution of language

University of Surrey case study: Open Data for language diversity

University of Surrey case study: A corpus approach to Roman law: Legal history meets computational linguistics

University of Manchester case study: Learning how to inflect verbs in different languages

University of Manchester case study: Experimental materials, data, and code for the paper Tracking the Eye of the Beholder

Examples of open research practices

Open Methods: Language and Cognition field manuals and stimulus materials from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/) provide an example of open resources and historical data for the fields of elicitation of semantics and collection of verbal behaviour. Due to the open nature of the tasks, they have been refined over many uses, which makes them a “joint product of many scholars working in over 50 languages and cultures.” The use of these materials can be coupled with open data from earlier uses, for comparison.

Open Data: The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) requires the production of a technical plan for any project it funds in which digital technologies play a significant part. Asa case study of this, Francesca Benatti worked on a project creating a searchable database, curated mostly from existing resources. She was required to produce a technical plan for the project, outlining the methodology, any technical support needed, the planned outputs, and a plan for the preservation, sustainability and future use of the project.

(See https://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/developing-rdm-services/dmps-arts-and-humanities)

Resources

General Resources

Guide on transitioning to open access. https://www.lingoa.eu/about/mission/
A collection of instruments, materials, stimuli, and data coding and analysis tools used for research into second languages. https://www.iris-database.org/iris/app/home/index
Encyclopaedia of linguistics. http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Main_Page
Marsden, E., Morgan‐Short, K., Trofimovich, P., & Ellis, N. C. (2018). Introducing registered reports at language learning: Promoting transparency, replication, and a synthetic ethic in the language sciences. Language Learning, 68(2), 309-320. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/lang.12284
Marsden, E., Crossley, S., Ellis, N., Kormos, J., Morgan‐Short, K., & Thierry, G. (2019). Inclusion of research materials when submitting an article to language learning. Language Learning, 69(4), 795-801. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/lang.12378
AHRC’s open access policy rationale. Open access policy update: July 2022 – UKRI

Open Methods

Paper outlining how methods can be made more open to the public. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12337
Sharing linguistic questionnaires and elicitation stimuli. http://tulquest.huma-num.fr/
Language and Cognition field manuals and stimulus materials. http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/
Tools for analysing language corpora. http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/
Tools for analysing corpus linguistic data. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/
Website for statistical analysis. http://langtest.jp/

Open Data

List of data repositories. https://guides.lib.ku.edu/c.php?g=94923&p=1224538
Child Language Data Exchange System. https://childes.talkbank.org/
Open data texts. https://www.english-corpora.org/
British Library Digital Collections and Data. https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2022/04/making-british-library-collections-even-more-accessible.html
Collection of Datasets for Natural Language Processing. https://medium.com/@ODSC/20-open-datasets-for-natural-language-processing-538fbfaf8e38

Open Outputs

List of open access resources for modern languages.
- https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/about-us/online-resources/open-access-resources-modern-languages
- https://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/
Guides to open access for linguistics.
List of platinum open access linguistics journals.
- https://oaling.wordpress.com/
Lists of open access resources for literature
OASIS database repository. https://oasis-database.org/

This page is adapted and extended from: Farran, E. K., Silverstein, P., Ameen, A. A., Misheva, I., & Gilmore, C. (2020, December 15). Open Research: Examples of good practice, and resources across disciplines. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/3r8hb