Comparative Pahoturi River Website

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Hi @mjcarroll! Welcome aboard! And thanks for pointing him this way, @katelynnlindsey Looking back I totally implied I was going to work with you and then did nothing! life.

Anyway, so many interesting observations here, @mjcarroll. I definitely agree on the availability of simple data being a huge plus in a project, and that all kinds of tools are useful in linguistic analysis. My opinion on software for documentation is, if it helps someone do language work of any kind — research, revitalization, pedagogy, whatever — it’s a net positive.

@mjcarroll

There are so many tools for analysing and visualising data these days, there is no point trying to replicate these on a website.

I don’t see it as a question of replication. There are some features of the web that essentially no other analytical tools offer: advanced layout (CSS grid, flexbox, incredible (and constantly improving) Unicode support, writing modes, and on and on.

Certainly, research patterns vary from person to person, and the web platform is not always the best home for certain kinds of research. Stats? Probably better off using R. Machine learning and stuff like that? Probably Python. And so on for several of the other tools you mention.

But those tools don’t match the accessibilty of the web. Just installation alone (or cost) can be a significant barrier.

@mjcarroll

The old Yamfinder site, which we started in 2012, took hundreds of hours of custom development and iteration and in the end most people just exported the data to excel (#facepalm).

I actually would love to hear more about this history. I tried looking up yamfinder in the Wayback Machine but couldn’t find any old versions

@mjcarroll

I really hope this post doesn’t sound too dogmatic or arrogant. I just worry that across our discipline so many projects have spent thousands of hours and research dollars developing custom databases for each project when in 90% of cases Zenodo is a better choice.

Certanly neither dogmatic nor arrogant. Science needs lots of viewpoints after all. I confess I have never really dug into Zenodo, although it‘s been mentioned here here and here — @rgriscom a local guru on that topic.

@mjcarroll

I would like to have an interactive website that allows you to filter by variety/word/IPA symbol, and let you click on the word like a button so that you can hear the audio file. I would like this to be automatically updateable as I add to the excel sheet and add to the folder of .wav files.

In this case, you can embed sound files in excel. If you need it online, i.e. for multiple researchers, you could use google sheets or excel 365 (although it doesn’t allow embedding of sound files but you can link to files hosted on github or somewhere else).

This discussion right here… dang, this touches on so many of the issues we face as a field right now. I think the best way to start is to try to enumerate a set of desiderata — the solutions will be interrelated, but

Desiderata

• Online - We want documentation to be widely available (where appropriate). Hosting is a hard problem.
• Linked, playable media - it should be possible to get playback next to the transcriptions
• Collaboration - several people should be able to update the content. Authentication and security are hard problems.
• Searchable/filterable/interactive - Online documentation should be more useful than a print equivalent. Even beyond playable media, we want to be able to do stuff with documentation.

This things are all pretty complicated. For some problems, a shared Excel/Office 365 whatever online spreadsheet could be fine (for instance, say, historical comparison). But for making research available to a speech community, for example, or for pedagogical purposes, Excel is going to be less ideal than the kind of thing https://www.yamfinder.com/ is providing.

I hope we can continue this discussion (perhaps in a separate topic so this one can stay related to the Pahoturi River languages content), because there are many paths to meeting all these desiderata (and others). What is most important, I think, is that we embrace experimentation and variation.