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Inside Collection (Course): Comparative Phonology Using Wordcorr
Summary: Titles are not informative enough for the Wordcorr community. Each collection needs a concise description, key words by which it can be located, and remarks on anything else that might be helpful.
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Names and titles are often not informative enough that a person who might profit from the contents of a collection can get a clear idea what is (and is not) in it. So Wordcorr requires a paragraph or more to describe the contents. It doesn’t have to be long, just long enough to be useful.
If you were doing a Google search for your collection, using just a regular Web browser like Firefox and not a special search engine developed for linguistics, what words would you use in the search? Put those in the Keywords field. Think about what other key words might lead people to your collection too. Separate the key words (or phrases) with comma space.
There is also an optional Remarks field for essential information that doesn’t fit standard library categories. For example, early versions of WordSurv, and many collections imported from spreadsheets, were made at a time when linguists had no access to character sets for the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in Unicode. So linguists each made up their own private conventions, things like capital “N” for angma, capital “E” for epsilon, “q” or “7” for glottal stop. There was no way they could standardize among themselves. So any collection with that kind of history needs an explanation of the original symbols in its Remarks field. From experience, we recommend that you put it in even if you think you’ve gone through and converted everything to IPA – it’s not impossible that you might have missed a few.
Anything else that linguists who use your data fifty years from now should know about your collection also goes into Remarks.
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This work is licensed by Joseph Grimes under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 2.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.
Last edited by Joseph Grimes on May 23, 2006 1:37 am -0500.
