Working in Ivanovka, summer 2016
Working in Ivanovka, summer 2016


This website is maintained by Niko Partanen and Michael Rießler. We have started this page as an open platform for technical documentation as well as a news forum for language documentation and corpus building projects affiliated with the Freiburg Research Group in Saami Studies and other institutions we collaborate with.

We collect our technical documentation to this GitHub Wiki page and everyone is welcome to contribute. We try not to duplicate work already done, so instead of general tool listings we try to gather resources and information directly related to our research practices and questions. This includes introductions, explanations and resources that we have found useful and want to share with the wider audience. One resource we are very eager to share consists from templates, which we currently have for ELAN files and also, for example, linguistic papers written in XeLaTeX and RMarkdown. With more technical tools that can be used in linguistic research we plan to collect also more detailed compilation and use instructions on Wiki, especially in the case the exact approach we take is not documented elsewhere. In those cases we naturally just link to already existing resources.

The main project the work has been taking place are Iźva Komi Documentation Project funded by Kone Foundation in 2014-2016, and the continuation project Language Documentation meets Language Technology, also funded by them on period 2017-2020.

Another collaborating project is Syntactic patterns in Pite Saami led by Joshua Wilbur. Some results of Wilbur’s ongoing work can be seen on Pitesamiska stavningsregler website and in this dictionary. In the long term the intention is to move larger part of our research infrastructure into open GitHub repositories.

Ob-Ugric Database is another collaboration partner within langdoc GitHub repository. The project continues a longer work done with Ob-Ugric languages. The project is led from universities of Munchen and Vienna.

However, since posts related to other projects carried out at institutions elsewhere are also published, our website is not strictly connected to any specific project or institution.

We use the rmarkdown package for building the site. The main reason for this is that R Markdown allows:

After this site was launched there have been new tools such as blogdown which certainly could be used. The current template is bit tricky to maintain, but on the other hand works quite well for blog as simple as this. Small adjustments will be done also to the older posts regularly, just in order to keep it compatible with new packages and new R releases. It is bit unsure whether this works best as an actual blog, or more as a collection of texts.

We are also interested about developing new open research practices and discussing the work we do and data we use with a wider linguistic audience. Although we still primarily publish in academic journals, there is wealth of scientific work that could also be communicated through other channels.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 2016 Niko Partanen or individual writers.