There seems to be a trend toward publishing academic papers as web documents — that is, in HTML and CSS (and maybe some Javascript) — as opposed to PDFs. Obviously, PDFs aren’t going anywhere, but the change is notable.
I just ran across this one via… uh… I cannot recall why I ran across this one. But it looks nice.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30527-0/fulltext
I think the language documentation world is really missing out here. Some of this goes on but web papers are still far from a default — we’re usually still getting papers where PDFs and media, for instance, are not really integrated. No shade whatsoever at the authors of this (fantastic! fascinating!) paper — I just randomly plucked it off of LD&C — but it is an example of how publishing conventions make audio sort of second class citizen to the PDF:
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/24912
Hearing the audio together with its transcription is quite challenging. I finally managed to get it to open in Adobe Acrobat Reader, after clicking through a warning that the document wanted to use the the Flash player, and that the Flash player is going to be discontinued. What is to become of this important fieldwork, then?
And even worse, the second time I open the PDF, the audio didn’t seem to work. It shouldn’t be this hard. We shouldn’t be depending on a deprecated, proprietary file form which makes our documentation of endangered language, endangered itself!
