eLanguage : News

Semantics and Pragmatics, LiLT publish first articles

eLanguage Admin — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:02:34 +0000

In what is shaping up to be a very successful month for the eLanguage journal family, both Semantics and Pragmatics and Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) have published their initial articles:

Barker, Chris and Chung-chieh Shan. “Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding”. Semantics and Pragmatics 1.1. 09 June 2008, 1-42.
<http://semprag.org/article/view/sp.1.1>

Burchardt, Aljoscha et al. “Constructing Integrated Corpus and Lexicon Models for Multi-Layer Annotation in OWL DL”. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology 1.1. 18 June 2008, 1-33.
<http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/lilt/article/view/65>

We’d like to thank the contributors, reviewers and editors for their hard work and for supporting eLanguage!

-Cornelius Puschmann

eLanguage Team

Making Book Notices smarter with WorldCat.org

eLanguage Admin — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:16:32 +0000

We’ve just started to implement a new feature that should be useful to many readers: if you want to check whether a book that you’ve just read about in the Book Notices section is available through your local library, you can now do so with a single click of the mouse. The ISBN number that is provided with each entry is linked to worldcat.org, the world’s largest meta-catalog. WorldCat is linked to libraries everywhere – just type in your city or postal code and you will taken to the appropriate page of your institution’s catalog where you can then check out the book if it is available. Right now only the last five BNs have been linked in this fashion, but we will provide these links on all reviewed items in the near future.

Have a look at this recently published notice and click on the ISBN to try it out for yourself.

This is just one of many ’semantic Web’ technologies that we plan to implement, which we hope will make the information on eLanguage.net more accessible and useful.

-Cornelius Puschmann

eLanguage Team

WALS Online launched

eLanguage Admin — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:09:40 +0000

While not itself a part of eLanguage, we’d like to bring an interesting project to your attention that has the potential to facilitate exciting new forms of digital publishing and research: the Web version of The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) which is now available. Please have a look at the launch notice here.

-Cornelius Puschmann

eLanguage Team

Journal of Mesoamerican Languages and Linguistics publishes first article

eLanguage Admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:41:41 +0000

We are proud to announce that one of our co-journals, the Journal of Mesoamerican Languages and Linguistics (JMLL), has published its first article:

Stross, Brian. “K’U: The Divine Monkey.” Journal of Mesoamerican Languages and Linguistics 1.1 08 Mar 2008 1-34. <http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/jmll/article/view/55>.

Several feature additions

eLanguage Admin — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:08:13 +0000

We are currently working on several additional features related to the Book Notices section, most of which should be implemented by the end of the week.

The additions will include

a full table of contents on the main Book Notices page that will allow navigation to each individual item
tag support, meaning that it will be possible to browse BNs via associated tags (e.g. morphology or Arabic)
COinS support via a WordPress plugin, allowing bibliographic tools such as Zotero to retrieve BNs and their metadata
a few minor optical fixes

I’ll post again once the changes have been implemented.
- Cornelius Puschmann, eLanguage developer

team@elanguage.net

Planned server downtime

eLanguage Admin — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:22:53 +0000

There will be a brief downtime affecting the eLanguage server tomorrow from approximately 2.00 – 2.30 am, as the replacement of a storage component makes a full reboot necessary. We thank you for your patience.

- Cornelius Puschmann, eLanguage developer

team@elanguage.net

Many new Book Notices to be published

eLanguage Admin — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:31:29 +0000

A long list of Book Notices is now ready for publication and will be made in the course of this week, following the initial five that were published in December. For now, we aim to release one or two texts per day in favor of a larger batch of texts once per quarter. The goal of this approach is to make optimal use of our web feeds, as those only hold the ten most recently published items.

Today’s review of Written communication across cultures: A sociocognitive perspective on business genres can be found here.

Want to keep track of new Book Notices? Subscribe to the feed.

And please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have suggestions for how we can improve eLanguage.

- Cornelius Puschmann, eLanguage developer

team@elanguage.net

OJS 2.2 released

eLanguage Admin — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:33:42 +0000

I’d like to inform all eLanguage contributors that a new version of Open Journal Systems (OJS) has just been released, after a long period of sustained development. OJS is what editors use to manage their journals in eLanguage, therefore the update to version 2.2 will bring numerous significant improvements. The new version will be tested thoroughly prior to deployment (which I expect to happen late in January or early in February). Meanwhile, if you’re dying for a little pre-holiday software testing, the release is available here.

- Cornelius Puschmann, eLanguage developer

team@elanguage.net

Book Notices and other content now available!

eLanguage Admin — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:43:40 +0000

Things have been very quiet on our end recently, but behind the scenes there has actually been a lot of activity concerning eLanguage. We’ve been able to integrate the Book Notices section that was previously a part of Language into the platform and plan to publish a large number of notices soon (have a look at the five initial ones if you like). Meanwhile, Semantics and Pragmatics has opened doors and is now accepting submissions, and it appears the launch has been quite a success.

Finally, we will present parts of the site at this year’s LSA Meeting in Chicago and talk to a number of stakeholders whom we are hoping to bring aboard. If you’re planning to attend and would like to have a chat with Dieter Stein or myself, do get in touch.

- Cornelius Puschmann, eLanguage developer

team@elanguage.net

Two articles on Linguistics and Open Access

eLanguage Admin — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 11:32:38 +0000

Mark Liberman recently posted an interesting piece on Language Log about how the situation of commercial scholarly publishing effects researchers, specifically in linguistics. In his post Mark points out how profoundly our way of finding and working with scholarly information has changed in recent years because of the Internet:

But the sad thing about all this is that hardly anyone will ever read the printed volumes, which will sit gathering dust on the shelves until eventually they are shipped to off-site storage. That’s not because no one is paying attention to the contents — I can’t answer for the rest of this particular publication, but the Bird & Liberman article that they’re reprinting has been widely read and cited, and we continue to get interesting feedback from people who are reading it and thinking about it and trying to improve the ideas in it. However, I can’t remember the last time that I went to the library to find the text of a recent article or book chapter in paper form — everything that matters is available online. (That’s not true, I hasten to add, for older works, for which I often do rely on the library; and I’m still a big fan of physical books, as a glance around my offices and living quarters will reveal.)

Another interesting read in the context is this article by Lee C. Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born, published earlier this year in Library Journal. From the article:

Open access is no longer a subtext in the annals of the journals industry. It stands alone as an alternative to the existing system of journal publication, which most say is unsustainable in its current form. It can mean different things to different proponents—a shared path to many ends. Libraries want relief from journal prices that are patently outrageous and defy cost-benefit justification. Authors want impact, and OA articles get cited much more often. Scientists want faster and easier access to others’ research, but a recent paper, “UK Scholarly Journals: 2006 Baseline Report,” found that half of all researchers in Britain have problems securing access to needed articles. Universities want a better return on their investment in intellectual capital, authors, peer reviewers, and editors. Taxpayers want to be able to read the research they sponsor.

One thing that is often overlooked is the last point: the significance of making research results available to those who sponsor it – the taxpayers. While there are areas of scientific inquiry which may seem more relevant to the general public than linguistics (say, cancer research), there’s a lot of interest from people all over the world in topics such as endangered languages, language and cognition, and many other issues that linguists investigate. Free and unrestricted access to information is beneficial on many levels and with eLanguage, we hope to contribute to the larger effort that is Open Access.

- Cornelius Puschmann, eLanguage developer

team@elanguage.net