RogBlog

I encountered Will Lewis‘s Online Database of Interlinear Text (ODIN) for the first time today. What a terrific idea: electronic resources are scarce for the vast majority of the world’s languages, but annotated corpora for these languages are sitting under our noses in the form of glossed examples from linguistics papers. ODIN scours the web to collect these and turn them into a searchable database. There is more to be done — both in data cleaning and in improving the search capabilities — before this resource will be usable for serious work, but it’s already a nice way of getting to online papers that cover a particular set of languages and/or linguistic phenomena. Now what would be great is a manual submission facility and encourage all linguists to submit their papers…