Tag Archives: how-to

How to Visualize Colexification Networks in Cytoscape (How to Do X in Linguistics 14)

Leave a reply

The ability to visualize data in an intelligible way is an important skill for scientists. In linguistics, especially in lexical semantics, data are often visualized using graphs, i.e., networks. For example, in the web app for the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS), we use networks to illustrate that a lexical form refers to two different concepts by connecting the concepts (i.e., nodes) with a line (i.e., edge). When identifying the colexifications between concepts across a large number of languages, the network grows and a tool to visualize multiple data points becomes necessary. Here, I present a tutorial for the first steps to visualize a colexification network with Cytoscape. The tutorial is intended for beginners who want to learn how the tool works and serves as a starting point for further skill development.

Continue reading →

How to Organize Literature and Notes in Zotero (How to do X in Linguistics 13)

Leave a reply

Reading, summarizing, and citing literature is an essential part of every student and researcher’s life. While there are many books and workshops on academic writing, there is less information on how to efficiently organize literature. For this reason, I offer an overview of how to organize literature and notes in Zotero. Specifically, I illustrate some of my own workflows for organizing the literature for my dissertation. I also discuss general features of Zotero. The interested reader who wants to learn more will benefit from the related links.

Continue reading →

How to Compute Colexification Networks with CL Toolkit (How to do X in Linguistics 11)

Leave a reply

A colexification network is a network consisting of concepts as nodes with weighted edges drawn between the nodes, indicating how often the concepts colexify across the data in a given sample of languages. Having seen how individual colexifications can be computed with the help of the CL Toolkit package in an earlier blog post, we will now see how this code needs to be extended in order to compute colexification networks.

Continue reading →

Blog Post Style Guide

Leave a reply

The Computer Language Comparison in Practice blog has grown steadily over the past few years. Each year we had a number of blog posts written by our colleagues on various topics. With the introduction of a PDF copy for every blog post and the publication of an annual volume, these blog posts can be treated like publications in a non-peer-reviewed journal. We hope that our blog will continue to be a valuable publication venue for our colleagues, not only those working in our research group and department, but also outside collaborators, and scholars who are generally interested in the topic and want to share their ideas. To maintain a coherent structure for all posts, this blog post provides a style guide for all future posts. Continue reading →

How to write a term paper in linguistics (How to do X in linguistics 9)

Leave a reply

Writing a term paper requires the same scrutiny as writing an article for a journal. As a result, the techniques which apply when writing term papers are very similar to those which apply when writing a journal article, and students should feel encouraged to take the task as seriously as a journal article that scientists send off to peer review. In the following, I will briefly introduce major techniques that help to structure one’s work when writing a term paper and which also help to interact well with one’s supervisor during the writing process.

Continue reading →

How to Share Data and Code when Submitting Papers to a Journal: Transparent Data (How to do X in Linguistics 8)

Leave a reply

When sharing data and code when submitting papers to a journal, you need to make sure that the reviewers can test and inspect your data as conveniently as possible. In between reviews, you should also be maximally transparent on any changes that have been made to the data or the code underlying your study. When using data that was published elsewhere, this means you should pay specific attention to the versions you have used and make sure they are readily accessible.

Continue reading →

How to Share Data and Code when Submitting Papers to a Journal: Practical Questions (How to do X in Linguistics 7)

7 Replies

The scientific culture in linguistics has been changing recently, and more and more papers are published with code and data accompanying them. What is still often forgotten, however, is that code and data should also be shared with the reviewers during the first submission of a paper in order to guarantee a maximally transparent review process that includes also a thorough inspection of the data and the code. This calls for attention from two sides: Reviewers should make sure that they receive data and code if they are needed to replicate the results reported in a paper, while authors should make sure to submit them to the reviewers in a way that they can easily inspect them. In this new blog post series, I want to summarize what authors should keep in mind when preparing their data and code for submission to a journal. On the one hand, I hope that this post will increase awareness among colleagues that data and code should be shared upon submission. On the other hand, I hope it also provides active help to all colleagues who plan to submit an article to a journal and are not sure how to share their data in the best form.

Continue reading →

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

Leave a reply

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

Continue reading →

How to organize a virtual journal club (How to do X in linguistics 4)

Leave a reply

Over the past year, the doctoral students of our department have been organizing a weekly journal club. For me as a linguist, the discussions of various research articles opened up a whole new perspective on science in general and linguistics in particular. I learned about the interests and viewpoints of my fellow doctoral students and other researchers in our department working on historical linguistics, language documentation, and cultural evolution. In addition,  organizing a journal club also helped me learn how to spark and lead a discussion. I hope the following personal insights offer some ideas and guidelines on how you can organize a journal club of your own.

Continue reading →

How to write an initial review for a journal in linguistics? (How to do X in linguistics 1)

Leave a reply

Writing reviews for a journal is one of those things which most scientists never actively learn. For laypeople, this may be surprising, given how often the scientific method with its rigorous peer review procedure is being mentioned in the news nowadays. How can it be, one may ask oneself, that this procedure that is usually presented as the core principle of scientific reasoning, is never really actively taught? If the review by experts is the core of the scientific method and what decides about the acceptance of an article, how can it be that scientists do never take a course on article reviewing, and how can it be that reviewers are (as I have previously discussed in a German blogpost) themselves never reviewed or graded?

Continue reading →