Creating a Virtual Center as an International Web-Based Interactive Infrastructure for Research and Teaching in the Language Sciences: A new Research and Library collaboration

Creating a Virtual Center as an International Web-Based
Interactive Infrastructure for Research and Teaching in the Language Sciences: A
new Research and Library collaboration.

María
Blume

Cornell University
mb48@cornell.edu

Elaine
Westbrooks

Cornell University
elw25@cornell.edu

Cliff
Crawford

Cornell University
cjc26@cornell.edu

James
Gair

Cornell University
jwg2@cornell.edu

Tina
Ogden

The Ogden Consulting Group
tina@tinaogdtina@tinaogden.com

Barbara
Lust

Cornell University
bcl4@cornell.edu

2003

University of Georgia

Athens, Georgia

ACH/ALLC 2003

editor

Eric
Rochester

William
A.
Kretzschmar, Jr.

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

We describe here the web-based Virtual Center for the Study of Language
Acquisition (VCSLA) now under development at Cornell University as a close
collaboration between the Cornell Language Acquisition Laboratory (CLAL),
Cornell's Albert Mann Library and a set of national and international
partners.
The purpose of this center is to foster and facilitate active and continuing
interactive research on shared data involving many different languages. Taking
advantage of the potentialities of the web, we bring together in a truly
interactive way the expertise of researchers at CLAL and that of others at a
number of scattered institutions, with the experience and capabilities of the
library in information technology applied to storage of and access to shared
data
This first stage of development, financed by an NSF Planning Grant, has a number
of crucial features, described here, that in assembly make it an innovative
creation that may also serve, as both an ongoing enterprise in language
acquisition research and a model for other fields as well.

1. While centered in CLAL, the VCSLA involves the active participation of
national and international researchers at other institutions, incorporating
a multi-directional flow of information and a perpetual linkage to the
library.
2. It incorporates the Virtual Linguistic Lab (VLL), a new web-based
interface for data transcription, analysis and access. This interface serves
as a common but flexible framework for data entry and access in an
interactive manner. This is well under development, and designed to be
applicable to both research and teaching.
3. The enterprise embodied is cross-linguistic, including data and
research on a widely spread set of languages that will be constantly
augmented. VLL furnishes a detailed framework, assuring cross-language
comparability, and facilitating both entry and access. It will include the
considerable resources amassed in CLAL, and that provided by the
participants physically located elsewhere. Thus it will necessarily be under
constant revision as information flows in both directions.
4. The presence of the Mann Library in VCSLA is a special and unique
element of its design. Mann Library brings its considerable expertise in the
areas of data preservation, data archiving, and metadata management into
force on the goals of the enterprise. This effort is consistent with the
Cornell Library’s long standing active commitment to outreach activities
that more firmly engage the library into faculty research and instruction in
non-traditional ways, including several of its current digital and Virtual
Library initiatives (See for example, “Reinventing the Humanities: Cornell
Librarians and Faculty Members Create Electronic Collaborations”, Cornell Library READ!, Winter 2002).
5. The cooperative effort with the library is crucial to the functioning
of VCSLA. Among other things, it links the VCSLA to the Open Language
Archives Community (OLAC), an international partnership of institutions and
individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language
resources, by agreeing to use The OLAC Metadata Set (OLACMS), a set of
metadata elements for describing language resources. This component thus
extends the informational and accessibility resources of the VCSLA.The
OLACMS Standard uses XML to represent metadata descriptions, and metadata
librarians at Mann are engaged in making the Cornell Language Acquisition
Lab and associated VCSLA a metadata provider as well as a service provider
within OLAC. That is, the library has built the infrastructure that allows
the CLAL to share its metadata with other OLAC participants and it also has
provided the interface that allows CLAL to harvest the metadata from other
OLAC participants.
6. There are in existence other forms of electronic data sharing for child
language research, notably CHILDES (Carnegie Mellon). VCSLA differs from and
is complementary to these in both scope and design, most notably in the
incorporation of the VLL format for comparability of data entry and access,
and in its essential interactive component. That is, it does not represent
simply a databank that allows researchers to access and enter data, but a
facility that allows interactive and cooperative communication and research
by active scholars who are physically separated by location. It is also
designed to be a useful element in the training of students, especially
potential researchers in language acquisition Also, as an International
Web-Based Interactive Infrastructure, it is designed to incorporate new
participants and laboratories worldwide, including areas and countries where
resources for training and research in the field are limited or nonexistent.

In our presentation we will sketch each of the above components of the VCSLA and
its progress to date. We present concrete examples of its applications to both
research and teaching in the language sciences.