Tag Archives: data curation

Five Recommendations for Creating Spreadsheets

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Through the rapid increase in digital data, the use of tabular formats for data has also increased notably. However, the reusability of data is still an issue due to the lack of transparency in the presentation of data in spreadsheets. In our work with the Concepticon, we sometimes encounter spreadsheets provided by researchers that contain information not transparent to an external audience. Therefore, I offer guidelines on how to format tables with data and provide five concrete recommendations.

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Converting Streitberg’s Gothic Dictionary to a CLDF Wordlist on a Windows System

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I recently converted the Gothic dictionary written by Wilhelm Streitberg to a CLDF wordlist. Since I was using Windows, I had some difficulties during the conversion progress, which Unix system users may not have to deal with. I thought it would be useful to share my experience here and point out that users of Windows operating systems should be aware of certain aspects when converting data to CLDF.

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Adding data sets to NoRaRe: A guide for beginners

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There has been much discussion about the reproducibility of research and how it can be improved (Munafò et al. 2017). One antidote to the “reproducibility crisis” seems obvious: data sharing. However, one additional point that is not mentioned as often is the standardization of shared data to make them comparable. Especially for cross-linguistic studies, this is an important step that needs to take place so that we can conduct reproducible studies in different languages. The NoRaRe database (Tjuka et al. 2021a) is a resource that provides standardized cross-linguistic data on norms, ratings, and relations published in psychology and linguistics. In this blog post, I describe a beginner’s guide to adding data sets to NoRaRe.

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How to review concept lists in collaboration (How to do X in linguistics 6)

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In 2016, the Concepticon was introduced as a reference catalog for linguistic data of various kinds (List et al. 2016). The aim of the Concepticon project is to collect concept lists and link the glosses in the lists to unified concept sets (List et al. 2016; List et al. 2020). The project is a collaborative effort and the group of editors is constantly adding new data to the Concepticon (https://concepticon.clld.org/). In 2019, we implemented a review process that works similar to a submission process at an academic journal and is improving the quality of the resource in many ways. This blog post describes our effort to improve data validity by reviewing every single concept list that is added to the Concepticon. The database is curated openly on GitHub, so you can follow our review process by looking at several examples here: https://github.com/concepticon/concepticon-data

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New Lexical Data for the Kusunda Language

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Endangered language documentation and endangered language revitalisation have been two hot topics in recent years. For instance, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared the year 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. However, although the UNESCO and many other organizations (e.g. The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme or SIL International) urge the public to be aware of the rapidly decreasing number of languages in the world, it does not slow down the annual rate of language loss. For example, the total number of speakers of the Kusunda language, a moribund language spoken in Nepal, decreased to only one person in 2020.

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Behind the Sino-Tibetan Database of Lexical Cognates: Introductory remarks

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One of the major efforts behind our recently published paper on the origin and spread of the Sino-Tibetan languages (Sagart et al. 2019) was the creation of a database of lexical cognates which was used to run the phylogenetic analyses. The creation of this database started about four years ago, when I joined the Centre des Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Oriental in Paris as a research fellow in January 2015, and Guillaume Jacques and Laurent Sagart approached me with the idea of making a phylogenetic study of Sino-Tibetan languages. In December 2017, almost three years after having started, our database consisted of 180 concepts translated into 50 different languages. Since creating the database was not directly straightforward from the beginning, with quite a few situations in which we realized we had to re-arrange the data or the procedure, I thought it might be useful to share our experience in a series of blog posts, as it might be interesting for scholars who wish to create their own database.

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