Advances in computing technology from the past few decades have opened the possibility of a cyberinfrastructure for linguistics that will advance the field by allowing linguists to analyze and test hypotheses against much larger data sets, collaborate with more people across greater distances, and as a result find solutions to questions not previously answerable. However, in order to realize the promise of a well-engineered cyberinfrastructure, the field needs to solve three problems: (1) establishing a culture of publishing and sharing data and annotations, and of expecting hypotheses to be tested against available data sets; (2) identifying existing standards and software that can contribute to a general cyberinfrastructure and plan how to build from them; and (3) developing a funding model which will sustain not only research contributions by linguists and computational linguists, but also software development (including user interface work) by software engineers.
These problems can not be solved by isolated research projects, but rather require wide-spread communication, participation and buy-in from the field. The goal of this workshop, Cyberling 2009: Towards a Cyberinfrastructure for Linguistics, is to bring together linguists representing a wide range of subfields (as well as outside specialists) who are interested in the potential of cyberinfrastructure for linguistics and who have experience in working with related projects to create a roadmap for solving the problems noted. The workshop is being collocated with the Linguistic Society of America's 2009 Linguistic Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, and includes open panel discussions to engage the general audience of the Linguistic Institute and thereby promote wider interest in cyberinfrastructure development within the field.
