Archiving and Managing Sociolinguistic Data: The Problems of Portability, Access and Security, and Discoverability and Relevance

Abstract

AbstractIn recent years, sociolinguists have become increasingly focused on and more explicit about ensuring the preservation, and accessibility, of their data. This increased focus on our data has involved new lines of work explicitly on data management and, in turn, has led to important (re)considerations of the nature of sociolinguistic data and the metadata of importance for sociolinguist research. While many of the papers in this special issue focus on issues having to do with specific metadata, in this paper, I consider archiving and sharing data more generally. I attend to three specific problem areas, portability access and security, and discoverability and relevance, providing advice as well as some ‘food for thought’ discussions for each.