LINGUIST List 11.802

Fri Apr 7 2000

Qs: Catalan Articles, Web-Based Scholarly Material

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Llorenc Comajoan, CRLN Catalan Bibliography
2. Mark Davies, Peer evaluation of web-based scholarly materials

Rosa M. Baya and myself are in the process of putting together the section
on Catalan Linguisitics in the Comparative Romance Linguistics Newsletter
(see http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~crln). If you have published something
regarding Catalan linguistics in 1999, I would appreciate it you sent me
the bibliographical reference at lcomajoaindiana.edu so that we can
include it in the bibliography. Thanks in advance. 

Llorenc Comajoan
lcomajoaindiana.edu
Indiana University

We are in the process of revising the promotion and evaluation procedures 
in all of the departments at Illinois State University, and I have been 
asked by a committee to get input from individuals at other institutions 
concerning how non-peer-reviewed, web-based materials could/should be 
evaluated by the institution.

Perhaps I can provide some concrete examples of the type of issues that the 
committee is looking at. In my case, I have created several online corpora 
that have been used by researchers and students at other 
institutions. These include a "Polyglot Bible" 
(http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/bible) that allows users to search for a word 
in the entire Gospel of Luke in one of thirty languages and see all of the 
hits, along with (most importantly) the parallel passages for other related 
languages (eg. Gothic, Old English, Icelandic, German, etc), which allows 
cross-linguistic comparison. (A more expanded version of this is also 
available for just Latin, Old Spanish, and Modern Spanish 
(http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/bible/span3.htm), and includes nearly the 
entire Bible).

More important for the type of issues the committee is looking at, I have 
created a searchable, web-based corpus of 3,000,000 words of historical 
Spanish texts (1200s-1900s) (http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/corpus), and I 
will soon start work on a web-based 100,000,000 word corpus of historical 
Spanish, based in large part on other available electronic corpora, but 
with enhanced search features and tied in with other linguistic tools (word 
frequencies, dictionaries, bibliographical information, etc). In each 
case, the materials have been used by many researchers and students at 
other institutions.

In the evaluation of materials such as these, the committee wants to know 
what the procedures and policies are at other institutions. For example:

1a) In general terms, are materials that are not peer-reviewed at the 
outset (but rather are simple something that a researcher has created and 
puts on the web, and only later receives some type of external validation) 
considered for promotion and evaluation?

1b) If so, at what level are they considered -- that of books, journal 
articles, book reviews, or potentially any of these levels, depending on 
the quality of the materials?

2a) Since they are not peer-reviewed at the outset, is the faculty member 
expected to provide documentation to show how they have been used and 
accepted by peers at other institutions?

2b) If so, what form would this documentation take -- logfiles showing the 
number of hits, email from many different users, comments from a selected 
set of peers, etc.

3) Many of these materials would be used by both researchers _and_ students 
at other institutions -- probably much more than a journal article, which 
would be primarily used by other researchers. Therefore, how can one avoid 
"double-dipping", by including these materials in both the "scholarly" and 
the "teaching" categories, for those institutions that organize things 
thusly? In other words, would developers need to document and prove that 
one or the other groups (scholars / students) are the main users of the 
resource?

I would very much appreciate your comments on any of these questions 
(mdaviesilstu.edu). Although I will most likely just be summarizing the 
responses for presentation to the committee, please feel free to indicate 
if you would like your comments to be anonymous.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Mark Davies


=======================================
Mark Davies, Associate Professor, Spanish Linguistics
Dept. of Foreign Languages, Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61790-4300

Voice:309/438-7975 email:mdaviesilstu.edu
Fax:309/438-8038 http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/personal/
=======================================