LanguageARC: using Citizen Science to augment sociolinguistic data collection and coding
LanguageARC is a Citizen Linguist portal for collecting linguistic data and judgements built upon a toolkit used in >100 collection and coding tasks yielding >1M judgements which has been augmented for direct researcher use. LanguageARC tasks are generally short enough that participants can complete them during lunch breaks, commutes, etc. Many require nothing more than a smart phone. Tasks present audio, text, video or image and collect new linguistic content or judgements as speech, text or controlled vocabulary enabling tasks as wide ranging as collecting: read (passages, word lists, minimal pairs) and prompted (by image or audio) speech; brief transcriptions, translations; and judgements for grammaticality, dialect and variable coding. Task designers can include multimedia tutorials and reference guides and can activate discussion forums for participants. LanguageARC includes a Project Builder that allows researchers to deploy new tasks in less than one hour, given a design and appropriately formatted data.
