Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of some of the recent language and linguistics projects which have been developed at the University of Glasgow, and focuses in particular on the ways in which these projects have engaged with a wide community of users at different stages of resource creation and completion. The main projects discussed are: (1) the Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech; (2) its sister resource, the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing; (3) Scots Words and Place-names; and (4) Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus. We draw out a number of themes which emerged in the creation and exploitation of these resources and others like them. These include: establishing and maintaining contact with users, supporting users in resource exploitation (including through metadata provision) and sustaining resources.
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- 1.
See, for example, the AHRC’s policy on impact, public engagement and knowledge exchange: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/What-We-Do/Strengthen-research-impact/Pages/Strengthen-Research-Impact.aspx (last accessed 18 May 2014).
- 2.
The SCOTS project team was led by Professor John Corbett. Details of the full team and further information about the project are available on the website (for this and other resources mentioned here, see the websites and online resources list at the end of this chapter).
- 3.
Wolfram et al. (2008: 1115) make a further point which is highly relevant here: ‘Communities that have been socialized into believing that their language variety is nothing more than “bad speech” are not particularly eager to celebrate this presumed linguistic inferiority, presenting a significant obstacle for the development of dialect awareness programs that celebrate local linguistic themes’. In the course of compiling the SCOTS corpus, we encountered divergent attitudes to—and indeed levels of awareness of—Scots as a language variety.
- 4.
Other sets of recordings that we were offered we sadly had to decline because it was not possible to obtain permission for their inclusion in a freely available online corpus.
- 5.
The CMSW project team was led by Professor John Corbett and the main researcher was Dr Jennifer Bann. Further details can be found on the project website (see section in References).
- 6.
- 7.
An element is an individual component of a place-name. For instance, the Scots element law ‘round hill’ occurs in a number of place-names including Lawhead, Lawmuir and Meikle Law.
- 8.
Information on the Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project can be found on the website (see section in References). Once complete, the ‘Metaphor Map’ resource will also be accessible from this site.
- 9.
The phrase is apocryphal, the actual wording being ‘First case your hare’.
- 10.
Or rather, methodologies: for instance, presentations to digital humanities groups concentrate on the technical side of the project, while theoretical issues are foregrounded in presentations to linguists.
- 11.
See Ross (2012) for an overview of social media including microblogging in academia, and as a means of engaging with the wider community.
References
Books and Articles
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Anderson, W., Hough, C. (2016). Engaging Users of Scottish Online Language Resources. In: Corrigan, K., Mearns, A. (eds) Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-38645-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-38645-8_3
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